About Carolyn Forché

Keynote speaker, Inauguration Ceremony
Friday, September 23, 2011

Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator and editor of the groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), which collected the work of poets who endured conditions of extremity during the past century. She has published four award-winning books of poetry and three books of poetry in translation. Her most recent collection of poems, The Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and she has given poetry readings throughout the United States and the world.

Forché's more than 30 years as a human rights activist began after she traveled to Spain in 1977 to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. Upon her return, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she served as a human rights advocate and was advised by Rev. Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., rector of Central American University and one of six Jesuit martyrs who in 1989 gave their lives after pressing to end human rights abuses attributed to violent government troops. She was presented in 1998 with the Edith and Ira Morris Hiroshima Fund Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture.

Forché has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other literary and teaching awards, including the Robert Creeley Award in 2005. In 2004, she became a trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, Canada's premier poetry award.

Forché has held the Lannan Chair in Poetry and is a professor of English at Georgetown University, where she also directs the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison. She is working on a memoir of her years in El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa and France.