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| Carolyn Forché (by Don J. Usner/Provided) |
On Saturday, June 5, 2021, Carolyn Forché will give a virtual reading as part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets series. The event will run from 2:30 - 3 PM (EST)
Her first poetry volume, Gathering the Tribes, was the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She has followed that with The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World.
Carolyn is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards.
She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, 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. 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.
Although Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged. After the publication of The Country Between Us, which included poems describing what she had personally experienced in El Salvador at the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War, she responded to controversy concerning whether or not her work had become “political,” by researching and writing about poetry written in the aftermath of extremity in the 20th century. She proposed that such works not be read as narrowly “political” but rather as “poetry of witness."
The live event link is https://youtu.be/RuYqHWNN_K4 The program will also be archived later at the same location.
This reading is part of the Poetry Center at PCCC's Distinguished Poets series.
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