“Writing Witness”

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three fellowships from the NEA, a Lannan Foundatioon Lierary Fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize, among other recognitions, Carolyn Forché is University Professor at Georgetown University. She published her first poetry collection in 1976, GATHERING THE TRIBES, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her subsequent books of poetry are THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US (Harper & Row, 1981), THE ANGEL OF HISTORY (HarperCollins, 1994), and BLUE HOUR (HarperCollins, 2003). She is also the author of the memoir WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, AGAINST FORGETTING: TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY OF WITNESS (W.W. Norton, 1993), has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology THE POETRY OF WITNESS: THE TRADITION IN ENGLISH (W. W. Norton). In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.