Poet Carolyn Forché will give a lecture titled “The Poetry of Witness” and read from her latest book of poetry, “Blue Hour,” at 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 9 in Severance Great Hall at Carleton College. A part of Carleton’s Christopher U. Light Lecture Series in the Arts and Literature, Forché’s lecture will address the works of poets who have endured the impress of extremity—warfare, exile, and imprisonment—in the 20th century. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception and book signing.
Forché’s first poetry collection, “Gathering The Tribes” (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award from the Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría, and upon her return, received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship which enabled her to travel to El Salvador where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, “The Country Between Us” (1982), received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and also was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her translation of Alegria’s work, “Flowers From The Volcano” and “El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers,” for which she wrote the text, were both published in 1983.
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. In 1998, she was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. “Sorrow,” a book of her translations of Claribel Alegría, was published in 2000. Forché’s fourth book of poems, “Blue Hour,” was published in 2003.
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 she received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. She teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program in poetry at George Mason University in Virginia.
For more information and disability accommodations, call the Carleton English department at (507) 646-4322.
