Poet Carolyn Forché to speak for Writing Program Reading Series Jan. 22

Poet Carolyn Forché, the visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22.

Carolyn Forché
Poet Carolyn Forché, © Emma Dodge Hanson.

The talk — part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the university’s Danforth Campus. A reception and book signing will immediately follow.

Known as a “poet of witness,” Forché is the author of four books of poetry. Her first collection, Gathering The Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The following year she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran—exile Claribel Alegría and later spent time in El Salvador, working as a human rights advocate.

Forché’s second book, The Country Between Us (1982), received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and also was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (1994) won The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her fourth collection, Blue Hour (2003), takes its title from the French phrase for pre-dawn light.

Forché’s translation of Alegria’s Flowers from the Volcano, was released in 1983. Other translations include Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003) and Robert Desnos’s Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991). She also edited the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993).

Other honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992 she received the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

Duncker Hall is located at the northwest corner of Brookings Quadrangle, near the intersection of Brookings and Hoyt drives. For more information, call (314) 935-7130 or email David Schuman at dschuman@wustl.edu.

Calendar Summary

WHO: Poet Carolyn Forché

WHAT: Reading from her work

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 22

WHERE: Hurst Lounge, Room 201 Duncker Hall

COST: Free and open to the public

SPONSOR: Washington University’s Writing Program Reading Series

INFORMATION: (314) 935-7130 or dschuman@wustl.edu