Carolyn Forché
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Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, and human rights advocate.
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[edit] 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, and their son, Sean-Christophe Mattison, who is a filmmaker.
[edit] 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), 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 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.
Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was released in 2003.
[edit] 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
