Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché is an influential American poet, memoirist, and human rights advocate, known for her profound engagement with themes of war, oppression, and social justice. Her interest in these subjects began in childhood, sparked by her discovery of disturbing images from World War II, which shaped her sensitivity to human suffering. Forché's experiences during her early adulthood, including her marriage to a Vietnam War veteran, further deepened her understanding of the emotional toll of conflict.
After earning her MFA in creative writing, she published her acclaimed first collection, *Gathering the Tribes*, which focuses on marginalized communities. Forché's transformative journey to El Salvador during a period of political unrest significantly influenced her work, leading her to produce notable collections like *The Country Between Us*, which blends poetry with political commentary. Throughout her career, she has been honored with prestigious awards and fellowships. In addition to her poetry, Forché has authored essays and memoirs, including *What You Have Heard Is True*, which explores her experiences as a witness to human rights abuses. Her literary contributions extend to editing anthologies that highlight the voices of those affected by war and injustice.
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Subject Terms
Carolyn Forché
- Born: 1950
- Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
Author Profile
Carolyn Forché’s interest in responding to human oppression can be traced to her early childhood in Detroit. When she was five she discovered a series of photographs in Life magazine documenting the liberation of the Nazi death camps. Disturbed by these pictures of immense suffering, Forché hid them between her mattresses and returned to them throughout her childhood.
Later, she was affected even more profoundly by war. At nineteen, Forché married James Turner, who, like a number of her high school classmates, fought in Vietnam and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Forché and Turner eventually divorced, but her poetry and work as an activist for Amnesty International continue to be informed by this experience with the emotional cost of war.
After graduating from Michigan State University with a major in creative writing in 1972, Forché pursued her interest in writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, receiving her master's of fine arts degree in 1975. A year later she published her first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, which focuses on the displaced and the forgotten, including her immigrant European forebears and Native Americans. The collection was awarded the 1975 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.
In 1975, Forché spent several months in Mallorca, Spain, living with and translating the poetry of Claribel Alegría, a Salvadoran exile who had chronicled the oppression in her native country. After returning to the United States, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to accept the invitation of one of Alegría's relatives to travel to El Salvador to observe the abuses of the United States-backed government. She was in El Salvador for two years and described her time there as “a moral and political education” that “would change my life and work” and “propel me toward engagement.” After returning from El Salvador, she spent the next four years lecturing in the United States about the injustices she observed there. Some of these experiences are documented in The Country Between Us (1981), which she characterizes as poetry of confrontation and witness. The collection was named the 1981 Lamont Poetry Selection and became a bestseller.
In 1984, Forché married Henry Mattison, a photographic correspondent for Time magazine. They had first met in El Salvador. Several years later while accompanying Mattison on assignment in Lebanon, she became a correspondent for National Public Radio's All Things Considered as a human rights liaison.
Almost twelve years after the publication of The Country Between Us Forché edited a collection of antiwar and anti-torture poems entitled Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993) and a year later published her own work on the subjects, The Angel of History (1994), which is a long poem that explores, among other things, the ramifications of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb. Forché's next collection was titled Blue Hour (2003). She published a memoir (The Horse on Our Balcony) in 2010, and in 2011 she published a collection of essays titled A Voice of My Own: Essays and Stories. Her fifth collection of poetry, In the Lateness of the World: Poems was published in 2020. In 2019, she published her autobiography, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. which won the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in 2019.
Forché has received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Post, and Esquire magazine. In 2010, the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania awarded her with an honorary doctorate degree.
Bibliography
Bedient, Calvin. “Poetry and Silence at the End of the Century.” Salmagundi, no. 111, Summer, 1996, pp. 195–207.
Bogan, Don. “The Muses of History.” The Nation, vol. 24,October 1994, pp. 464–69.
"Carolyn Forché Explores Writing 'As An Outcry of the Soul' in 'Poetry of Witness.'" PBS, 29 Jan. 2014. www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/carolyn-forche-explores-writing-as-an-outcry-of-the-soul-in-poetry-of-witness. Accessed 22 Apr. 2023.
“Carolyn Forché.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche. Accessed 22 Apr. 2023.
Doubiago, Sharon. “Towards an American Criticism: A Reading of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 12, 1983, pp. 35–39.
Forché, Carolyn. Interview by David Montenegro. The American Poetry Review, vol. 17, Nov./Dec. 1988 pp. 35–40.
Forché, Carolyn. "The Lost and Unlost: Poetry and the Irrevocable Past." Poetry Foundation, 2 May 2011. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69689/the-lost-and-unlost. Accessed 22 Apr. 2023.
Gleason, Judith. “The Lesson of Bread.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review, vol. 10, 1982, pp. 9–21.
Greer, Michael. “Politicizing the Modern: Carolyn Forché in El Salvador and America.” The Centennial Review, vol. 30, 1986, pp. 125–35.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” American Poetry Review, vol. 30, no. 2, 2001, pp. 35–39.