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 College, Columbia University, and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. She now teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, and their son, Sean-Christophe Mattison, who is a filmmaker.

Career

Forché's first poetry collection, "Gathering the Tribes" (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award from 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 Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, "The Country Between Us" (1981), was published with the help of Margaret Atwood. It 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. 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 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 famed poem "The Colonel". She is also a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Though Forché is often described as a political poet, she prefers the title of "poet of witness" since it does not limit the writer to a specific political position. After first acquiring both fame and notoriety as a political writer from "The Country Between Us", she pointed out that this reputation rested on a limited number of poems describing what she personally had experienced in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic is more one of rendered experience and at times of mysticism than one of ideology or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet's use of language. The anthology "Against Forgetting" was intended to collect the work of twentieth-century poets who had experienced political upheavals including atrocity, rather than poets belonging to any one ideological persuasion. At the same time, Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this she was strongly influenced by Terrence des Pres.

Forché is also influenced by her Slovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included prisoners in Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt. Forché was raised Roman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work.

Her fourth book of poems, "Blue Hour", was released in 2003.

Forthcoming books include a memoir, "The Horse on Our Balcony" (2009, HarperCollins), a book of essays (2010, HarperCollins) and a fifth collection of poems, "In the Lateness of the World" (HarperCollins).

Bibliography

*"Women in American Labor History, 1825-1935: An Annotated Bibliography" (Michigan State University, 1972), with Martha Jane Soltow and Murray Massre
*"Gathering the Tribes" (Yale University Press, 1976), ISBN 0300019831
*"History and Motivations of U.S. Involvement in the Control of the Peasant Movement in El Salvador: The Role of AIFLD in the Agrarian Reform Process, 1970-1980" (EPICA, 1980), with Philip Wheaton
*"The Country Between Us" (Harper & Row, 1981), ISBN 0060149558
*"El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers" (W.W. Norton, 1983), ISBN 0863160638
*"Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness" (W.W. Norton, 1993), ISBN 0393033724 (ed.)
*"The Angel of History" (HarperCollins, 1994), ISBN 0060170786
*"Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" (Story Press, 2001), ISBN 1884910505 (ed. with Philip Gerard)
*"Blue Hour" (HarperCollins, 2003), ISBN 0060099127

External links

* [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/forche/wrightinterview.htm Modern American Poetry - An Interview with Carolyn Forché by David Wright]