CAROLYN FORCHÉ is a poet, translator, essayist and human rights activist. She is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, winner of the LA Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translations include Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, and other works. She edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Lannan Foundation, and the Robert Creeley Award, the Levinson Prize, among others. She is a trustee of the Griffin Trust. She co-edited The Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001, published in 2014, along with a memoir, a book of essays, and a poetry collection. She teaches and is Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.
Carolyn Forché
Videos
Craft Talk This Year's Festival Lineup includes:
Together we’ll work on your poems inside and out, in our hands-on line-by-line discussion of three poems by each participant. To shape our conversation and study, submit two one-page poems and be ready to write a ... Read more >
The focus of this workshop will be on revision: how can we acquire the tools we need to revise our poems on our own? Many aspiring and even experienced poets find it challenging to revise ... Read more >
Every writer has their strengths, but we often tend to over-rely on what we already know we do well. In this workshop, we will focus on how to create a balance of tension in poems. ... Read more >
This workshop will focus on the revision process. We’ll discuss various revision strategies that will help us tighten our poems, but also explore revision as a process that allows us to imagine other possibilities for ... Read more >
In this workshop we will explore how poems need not end with an ascendant or descendent gesture to be as haunting and powerful as a poem that affirms the human condition and assures us that ... Read more >
All poetry is conventional and all convention exists in public spaces and in history. This workshop will take these truths to be fundamental to free verse poetry and, drawing from them, will examine the various ... Read more >
Participants will discuss how the poet is handling content – the decisions that have been made in terms of diction, form, pacing, syntax, etc. with a mind to coming up with useful ideas for revision. ... Read more >
In this generative workshop, we will be writing and revising poems of delight, celebration, and grief, paying special attention to tone of voice. Tone is often defined as an author’s attitude toward her subject, but ... Read more >
This year’s Thomas Lux Memorial Reading and Special Interview Event will feature a one-on-one interview of Gregory Orr by Laure-Anne Bosselaar to be followed by a Q&A session with the poet on Tuesday, ... Read more >
Descriptions of 2021 Poet-at-Large Brian Turner’s virtual high school performances and a special evening event with this distinguished poet are forthcoming. Read more >