Visiting Poet Carolyn Forché to Read and Lecture

Poet Carolyn Forché will visit the College September 30 to October 4 to kick off the fourth year of the Department of Writing Distinguished Visiting Writers Series. In addition to conducting master classes and meeting with students and faculty, Forché will give two free public presentations.

On Tuesday, October 1, she will read from her poetry at 7:30 pm in Textor 102. On Thursday, October 3, she will deliver a talk, "The Poetry of Witness," at 7:30 pm in Emerson Suite B, Phillips Hall.

Forché's first book of poems, Gathering the Tribes, is a powerful accounting of her adolescence and young adult life. The volume won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1975, when Forché was 25. Between 1978 and 1980 she traveled to Central America and documented human rights conditions in El Salvador for Amnesty International. Upon her return to the United States, she published a second volume of poetry, The Country between Us, which reflects her Salvadoran experiences. That book won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. It also established her as a spokesperson for what has come to be called the "poetry of witness."

"Writers should speak to the most serious questions of society," Forché says. "Writers face demands to act as voices."

In addition to her own firsthand account of human rights violations, Forché has edited two anthologies of poems written by observers of atrocities. Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness was published in 1993. The Angel of History appeared a year later and was awarded the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry.

"Many of the poems are eyes-open, horrifyingly graphic portrayals of human brutality," wrote Matthew Rothschild in the Progressive. "But others are of defiance, demonstrating resolve and extracting hope even in the most extreme circumstances."

Forché's other works include The Colonel and El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers. She has also translated Flowers from the Volcano, a volume of poems by Salvadoran exile Claribel Alegria.

Forché has been a correspondent for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and has served as a member of the Commission on U.S. - Central American Relations. She currently teaches in the master of fine arts program in poetry at George Mason University in Virginia.

Since its inception in 1999, the department's visiting writers series has hosted William Kennedy, Judy Grahn, Joy Williams, Barbara Ehrenreich, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, and W. P. Kinsella.

For more information contact Katharyn Howd Machan, associate professor of writing, at 274-3325 or machan@ithaca.edu.