Carolyn Forché is a poet, a human rights advocate, and professor at Georgetown University. She coined the term “poetry of witness,” and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the editor of the ground-breaking 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. The first of her five published collections of poetry won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award in 1975, and her 2019 book What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and won the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. In between she’s received grants and awards too numerous to mention, including a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed her to travel to El Salvador as part of Amnesty International, in time to witness the unfolding civil war, which she wrote about in The Country between Us in 1981.

She and her husband of nearly 40 years live in Maryland. For more, check

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Forch%C3%A9