معرفی
Carolyn Forché (born 1950) serves as University Professor at Georgetown University and Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. Elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2022 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2023, she is renowned for pioneering "poetry of witness" that confronts political violence and human rights abuses through literary testimony.
Her educational background:
- Justin Morrill College
- Michigan State University
- MFA, Bowling Green State University
- PhD, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Forché's creative scholarship centers on witness literature, translating traumatic historical experiences into poetic form. Her work examines political violence in El Salvador, Central America, and global conflict zones, establishing foundational frameworks for testimonial writing that bridges poetry, human rights documentation, and historical memory. She has significantly advanced translation studies through her work with Claribel Alegría and Mahmoud Darwish.
Spanning five decades, her poetic output evolves from frontline witness in 1970s-80s El Salvador to contemporary meditations on displacement and historical trauma. Recent collections like In the Lateness of the World (2020) address refugee crises and ecological collapse while maintaining her signature fusion of personal testimony and political urgency.
Major honors include:
- Windham-Campbell Prize (2017)
- Lannan Award in Poetry (2020)
- Induction into American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2023)
- American Book Award for In the Lateness of the World (2020)
- Los Angeles Times Book Award for The Angel of History (1994)
- Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture (1996)
Her creative work has been sustained by major fellowships:
- John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
- Lannan Foundation Fellowship
- National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
- Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship
No public records indicate graduate student advising. Her editorial projects—including the seminal anthology Against Forgetting—have cultivated global communities around witness literature without formal institutional labs or research teams.
