POET

Carolyn Forché (1950 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Detroit, Michigan, CAROLYN FORCHÉ (1950—) became prominent as a “poet of witness” with the publication of her second collection, The Country Between Us (1982). Growing out of her experiences as a human-rights activist in El Salvador, the book’s poems explore the effects of political violence on personal lives. Since then she has published two more volumes of poetry as well as translations and essays. An anthology she edited, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, appeared in 1994.