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.

Biography 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 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 Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and 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.

Forché lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she married in 1984. Their son is Sean-Christophe Mattison.

Career Awards and publications 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 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., the book also won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.

In 2024, she was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.

Readings and translations Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Claribel Alegría's Sorrow (1999), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, for the Modern English Poetry Series, 1991).

Forché is also influenced by her Slovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included a woman resistance fighter imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of former Czechoslovakia. Forché was raised Roman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work.