Submitted by: Michael Blanchard, blanchardmd@netscape.net on 09/22/2023
On Oct. 3-4, the University of Central Arkansas School of Language and Literature, along with the UCA Creative Writing Program, will host a campus visit by internally acclaimed poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché.
Highlight of Forché’s visit will be a public reading and book signing as part of SLANT’s Visiting Poet Series at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 3, in the Concert Hall of the Windgate Center for Fine & Performing Arts on the UCA campus.
Two other events of note during Forché’s visit will be as follows:
– A Master Class for graduate students in Language, Literature & Creative Writing: 4 p.m., Oct. 3, Thompson Hall 331
– A craft talk to undergraduate students in Language, Literature & Creative Writing: 10 a.m., Oct. 4, Black Box Theatre of the Windgate Center
An American by birth and principal residence, Forché has earned an international reputation. She has given poetry readings in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Belarus, Finland, Sweden, Republic of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Libya, Japan, Colombia, Mexico and Canada. Her poetry books have been translated into Swedish, German and Spanish. Individual poems have been translated into more than twenty other languages.
She is the author of five books of poetry to date, the most recent of which is In the Lateness of the World (2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and was subsequently published by Yale University Press. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), published with the help of Margaret Atwood, received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. That collection includes poems describing what she had personally experienced in El Salvador at the beginning of the twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War.
Forché has translated the works of several poets from other countries, including those from Palestine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and France. Her original poetry and her translations are often placed in the service of her human rights work. Her literary effort is often referred to as political poetry, but she prefers the term “poems of witness.”
She is also an editor and compiled the widely acclaimed anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, first published by W.W. Norton in 1993 and still used as a textbook in colleges and universities throughout the nation. More recently, she collaborated with Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky to edit the collection In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine, published by Arrowsmith Press earlier this year.
Her memoir about her time in El Salvador, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Truth and Resistance, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2019 and won the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
Forché’s visit is made possible by a grant from the Artist in Residency Fund of the UCA College of Art, Humanities & Social Sciences. SLANT is the UCA journal of contemporary poetry.
For more information, contact Michael Blanchard, adjunct faculty in English and editor of SLANT, at mblanchard@uca.edu.
