Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is amongst other things a poet, professor, and human rights activist, a guest in 2021 and at the 1985 edition of the Poetry International festival. Her work reflects her concerns about human rights. In her second collection The Country Between Us (1981), she reports on the horrors she witnessed right before the start of the civil war in El Salvador. In 2019, her autobiography What You Have Heard Is True was published. In it, Forché writes of her experiences of the unrest, poverty and threat of a civil war in the flesh. In March of 2020, seventeen years after her previous poetry collection, her collection In the Lateness of the World appeared. This volume, too, demonstrates her engagement with the hard parts of reality. In interviews Forché often calls herself a ‘poet of witness’: a poet who is politically engaged, but not a political poet.