Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/26/2022
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location
Cross Roads Retreat
Categories
Sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies at Fairfield University, poet Carolyn Forché will present a lecture titled “Writing in a Time of Peril” on Wednesday, October 26 at 7:30 p.m.
Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché of Georgetown University, will deliver the 2022 Catholicism and the Arts lecture, entitled “Writing in a Time of Peril,” in the Dolan School of Business Event Hall at Fairfield University on Oct. 26 at 7:30 p.m. This in-person event is free and open to the public, and will also be available for remote viewers. Register for the livestream at fairfield.edu/cs.
Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Her first collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The following year, she traveled to El Salvador on a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, to work as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1982), received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (Harper Collins 1994), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Blue Hour is her fourth collection of poems (HarperCollins, 2003). Her most recent collection, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), is a book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders, but also between the present and the past, life and death.
Forché is also the author of the 2019 memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House), a devastating, lyrical book about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. “Carolyn Forche’s urgent and compelling memoir narrates her role as witness in an especially explosive and precarious period in El Salvador’s history,” said poet Claudia Rankine. “This incredible book shapes chaos into accountability. It marries the attentive sensibility of a master poet with the unflinching eyes of a human rights activist.”
A 1998 recipient of the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, Forché’s articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, and others. She has held three fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. In 2013, Forché won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement.
Forché is Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and professor of English at Georgetown University, and lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.