Carolyn Forché
OKLAHOMA CITY — Award-winning poet and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché will read and discuss her works during a presentation at 8 p.m. April 13 at OCU.
OCU also will host an open microphone poetry reading for Forché at 6:15 p.m. April 13. Both events are free to the public and will take place in the Kerr McGee Auditorium in the Meinders School of Business.
Forché is the author of four books of poetry. Her first poetry collection, “Gathering the Tribes,” won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.
She then 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 that enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate.
Her second book, “The Country Between Us,” received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. It was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 1994 her third book of poetry, “The Angel of History,” was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her fourth book of poems, “Blue Hour,” was published by HarperCollins in 2003.
Forché received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in 1998 in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. She is the Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and a professor of English at Georgetown University. She is currently working on a memoir of her years in El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa and France, with mentions of her childhood and her present life.
