Carolyn Forché

Harry Mattison

Carolyn Forché’s first book of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In March, 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She has published translations of the work of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, and Mahmoud Darwish. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and is a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Books by this author

Awards and Honors

Shortlist, James Tait Black Prize, United Kingdom, 2020

Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, 2020

Finalist, Chattaqua Prize, 2020

Mary McCarthy Award, Bard College, 2020

Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, 2019

Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction, 2019

Denise Levertov Award, 2018

Presidential Medal, Chapman University, 2018

Windham Campbell Prize, Yale University, 2017

Presidential Fellowship, Chapman University 2017-2020

Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses, 2017

Finalist, Neustadt Prize, World Literature Today, 2015

The Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 2013

Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, 2012

Honorary Doctor of Letters, Marquette University, 2011

Levinson Prize, Poetry, 2011

Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Scranton University, 2010

Golden Rose Award, New England Poetry Society, 2008

Mother Teresa Award, Tetovo, Macedonia, 2007

Robert Creeley Award, 2005

Finalist, Lenore Marshall Prize, 2004

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award, 2003

Jefferson Cup Human Rights Award, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2002

Special Honor, Society of The Americas, New York, New York 2002

Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, Stockholm, 1998

Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellow, 1996

Curbstone Press Award for Contribution to Literary Culture, 1995

Doctor of Arts, California Institute of the Arts, 1995

Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, 1994 for The Angel of History

The Best of Granta Reportage, Granta Books, 1993

Woodrow Wilson – Lila Wallace Teaching Fellow, 1994

Woodrow Wilson – Lila Wallace Teaching Fellow, 1992 and 1993

Charity Randall Citation, International Poetry Forum, 1992

Lannan Foundation Fellowship, 1990-91

The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, 1989

Artists’ Foundation of Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry, 1988

Doctor of Literature (Honorary) Russell Sage College, 1985

The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, 1984

Esquire Honoree, Outstanding Americans Under Forty, 1984

Society of Midland Authors, Best Book of Poetry, 1982

Los Angeles Times Book Award Nominee, 1982

Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, 1981

Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Poetry Society of America, 1981

Emily Clark Balch Prize, The Virginia Quarterly Review, 1979

Distinguished Faculty Award, The Jefferson Society, University of Virginia, 1979

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1978

The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, 1977

The Timeos Award for Teaching, presented by Phi Eta Sigma to Distinguished Younger Faculty, San Diego

 State University, 1977

The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, 1976

The Tennessee Williams Fellowship in Poetry (Breadloaf Writers’ Conference) 1976

The Devine Memorial Fellowship in Poetry, Bowling Green University 1975

The Chicago Review Prize for Poetry, 1975