Literature / Civil rights & activism
Carolyn Forché
born 1950 · poet, translator, human-rights advocate
Detroit-born poet of The Country Between Us and The Colonel, a leading voice of the 'poetry of witness', raised in a Slovak-American family in the Detroit suburbs.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan
age 76- Birth name
- Carolyn Louise Sidlosky
- Detroit years
- 1950–1968
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Forché was born in Detroit to Michael Sidlosky and Louise Blackford and grew up, the eldest of seven children, in a Slovak-American Catholic family in the city's western suburbs; her immigrant grandmother's stories of wartime Czechoslovakia marked her deeply. She studied creative writing at Michigan State University and in 1976 won the Yale Series of Younger Poets with Gathering the Tribes. Her time in El Salvador at the start of its civil war produced The Country Between Us (1981), with its famous prose poem The Colonel, and she went on to edit the anthology Against Forgetting, defining a 'poetry of witness' to war and atrocity. Her memoir What You Have Heard Is True was a National Book Award finalist in 2019.
Highlights
- Gathering the Tribes (1976), Yale Series of Younger Poets
- The Country Between Us (1981), Lamont Poetry Selection
- Editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993)
- Memoir What You Have Heard Is True (2019), National Book Award finalist