Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché (born April 28, 1950) is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work. Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972 and a Master of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in 1975.

She has taught at a number of universities, including Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University, the University of Virginia, Skidmore College, Columbia University, San Diego State University, and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. Forché is a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University and has received honorary doctorates from the University of Scranton, the California Institute of the Arts, Marquette University, Russell Sage University, and Sierra Nevada College.

She was the Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. She is co-chair, with Gloria Steinem, of the Creative Advisory Council of Hedgebrook, a residency for women writers on Whidbey Island. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she married in 1984. Their son is Sean-Christophe Mattison.

Forché's first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, leading to publication by Yale University Press. After her 1977 trip to Spain in which she translated the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría as well as the works of Georg Trakl and Mahmoud Darwish, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate, mentored by Leonel Gómez Vides.

Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), published with the help of Margaret Atwood, received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Forché has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 1992, received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Additional awards include the Robert Creeley Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture, and the Denise Levertov Award.

Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (1994), was chosen for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include The Colonel's famed poem (The Country Between Us). She is also a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, Boston Review, and others.

Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was released in 2003. Other books include a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony (2010, HarperCollins); a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins); a memoir about her time in El Salvador, What you have Heard Is True (2019, Penguin Press); and a fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, 2020).

In October 2019, What You Have Heard is True was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her 2019 book What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.