The Literary Arts Institute will present award-winning author and poet Carolyn Forché for a week-long writer-in-residence from April 3-9 at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.
Forché will read from her work and be in conversation with the audience at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, in Gorecki 204 at CSB.
Forché will discuss her writing process and take questions from the audience at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in Quadrangle 264 at SJU. There is also a Zoom option available for this event, but you must register to receive the Zoom link.
Masks are required for both events.
Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent poetry collection is In the Lateness of the World, which was an American Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist.
She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard is True, a devastating, lyrical and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards.
She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness.
In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.
Carolyn Forché