Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, and human rights advocate.

Life

Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 28, 1950, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a B.A. in international relations and creative writing at Michigan State University in 1972. After graduate study at Bowling Green State University in 1975, she taught at a number of universities, including the University of Arkansas, Vassar, Columbia, and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. She now teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison and their son, Sean-Christophe Mattison, who is a filmmaker.

Career

Forché's first poetry collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award from the Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Upon her return, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1982), received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, and others. Forché has held three fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 1993, and in 1994, her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (HarperCollins, Publishers), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include the famed poem The Colonel. She currently teaches at Skidmore College. She is also a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Bibliography

• Gathering the Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976)
• The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1981)
• The Angel of History (HarperCollins, Publishers, 1994)
• Blue Hour

External links

• Carolyn Forché's official webpage at George Mason University
• Essay on Forché and three other poets