Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan and currently resides in Washington, D.C.  She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University.

Known as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is the author of four books of poetry.

Her first poetry collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría, and upon her return, received a John Simon 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 (Harper and Row, 1982), received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets.   In 1994, her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (HarperCollins), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was published by HarperCollins in Spring 2003.

Her translation of Alegria's work, Flowers From The Volcano, was published by the University Pittsburgh Press in 1983, and that same year, Writers and Readers Cooperative (New York and London) published El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, for which she wrote the text. In 1991, The Ecco Press published her translations of The Selected Poetry of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik).

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 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.

Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 1993.  In 1998 in Stockholm, 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. In April of 2000, Curbstone Press published a new book of her translations of Claribel Alegría, Sorrow. The book she co-translated, Selected Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, was published by the University of California Press in fall 2002. A chapbook selection of that work was published by The Lannan Foundation, fall 2001. 

Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

She is at work on a memoir tentatively titled The Horse on Our Balcony. It is, in part, a conversation between Forché and her former student, the poet Ilya Kaminsky, at whose prompting she writes the story of her years in El Salvador, Lebanon, South Africa and France, with forays into childhood and her present life.

Carolyn Forché is Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and Professor of English at Georgetown University.

More about Carolyn  at The Poetry Foundation website

and at The American Academy of Poets website

"Perhaps no one better exemplifies the power and excellence of contemporary poetry than Carolyn Forché, who is not only one of the most affecting ... poets in America, but also one of the best poets writing anywhere in the world today," --Jonathan Cott, in the introduction to his interview with Forché for Rolling Stone.