Claire Messud writes, “In this searing, vital memoir, Carolyn Forché at last reveals the dark stories behind her famous early poems: she brings alive the brutality, complexity and idealism of El Salvador in the late 1970s, a time of revolution that echoes all too painfully in the present. What You Have Heard Is True was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. She is also the author of the 2019 memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary book about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish.

Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award.

She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.

Carolyn forche what you have heard