Distributed November 20, 2000
For Immediate Release
News Service Contact: Mary Jo Curtis



President’s Lecture Series

Poet Carolyn Forché to discuss The Angel of History Dec. 4

Award-winning poet Carolyn Forché, internationally recognized for her writings and work on behalf of human rights and for the preservation of memories from the darkest moments of the 20th century, will read and discuss her most recent collection of poetry. Her presentation, part of the President’s Lecture Series, will begin at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 4, 2000, in the Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Award winning poet Carolyn Forché, internationally recognized for her work on behalf of human rights and for the preservation of memory and culture, will read from and discuss her work Monday, Dec. 4, 2000, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green. Her appearance is part of the President’s Lecture Series.

Forché, the author of three collections of poetry, will read from and discuss her most recent book, The Angel of History (1994), a polyvocal meditation on some of the darkest human events in 20th century history.

Forché's work has earned accolades from the start. Her first book of poetry, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Her second, The Country Between Us (1982) – which was based on her experience working as a human rights activist in El Salvador – won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets.

In addition to writing her own poetry, Forché has translated the work of other poets, written the text for El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, and edited the 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, a collection of poetry by writers who endured the social, historical and political atrocities of the last century. She has published articles, essays and book reviews in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Esquire, The Nation and The American Poetry Review, among others. Forché also worked as a correspondent in Beirut, Lebanon for National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and as a human rights liaison in South Africa. In 1998 she was honored with the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award; she also has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 1992, received both a Lannan Foundation Literary Award and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum.

Forché earned an MFA at Bowling Green University in 1975 and currently teaches in the MFA poetry program at Virginia’s George Mason University. Her work has been translated into 14 languages, and she was recently featured in the PBS series The Language of Life. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.

Forché’s presentation is open to the public without charge.

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