Poet activist Forché will give reading

Forché

Carolyn Forché, who has won awards for her poetry and for her human rights work, will read from her poems at 8 p.m. Wednesday, November 18 in the Welles-Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library.

Her reading is part of the Hyam Plutzik Memorial Poetry Series and is free and open to the public.

Forché is the author of three highly acclaimed books of poetry. The first, Gathering The Tribes, won the 1976 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, chosen by renowned American poet Stanley Kunitz.

The following year Forché traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegria. Upon her return she received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and worked as a human rights activist in El Salvador for two years.

Her experiences there are reflected in her second book, The Country Between Us, which received the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Said poet Denise Levertov of the work: "She is creating poems in which there is no seam between personal and political, lyrical and engaged. And she's doing it magnificently, with intelligence and musicality, with passion and precision."

Forché's third book of poetry, The Angel of History, was published in 1994 and received the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Forché is also the editor of an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, a meditation on war and violence in this century and how human memory deals with and survives unimaginable horrors.

This year Forché received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. Previously, she was honored with a Lannan Foundation Literary Award for promoting "a truer understanding of contemporary life."

Forché teaches in the graduate writing program at George Mason University.

For more information about the Plutzik Series and Forché's appearance, call the English department at x5-4092.