Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché talks about the world she crafted in her memoir: What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance. Horrors and bravery brought to life in a lyrical memoir of empathy and intrigue.

Watch the interview

Chancellor
Academy of American Poets

Founded in 1934 in New York City, the Academy of American Poets is the nation's leading champion of American poets and poetry, with members in all fifty states

Poet, writer, and activist.

Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. An articulate defender of her own aims as well as the larger goals of poetry, Forché is perhaps best-known for coining the term “poetry of witness.” Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to one another.

“Forché’s work is unusual in that it straddles the realms of the political and the poetic, addressing political and social issues in poetry when many poets have abandoned these subjects altogether. In recognizing the link Forché has made between these worlds, the Hiroshima Foundation recognizes her human rights work as much as it does her writing.” – Hope J. Smith, in the Madison Gazette

NOTABLE WORKS

Bibliography

A devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir

This is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.

WATCH THE VIDEO

The Silence of God is God

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."
-WALTER BENJAMIN, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," IX

Watch the video

ORDER

Events & Readings

OTHERWHERE: New and Selected Poems 1976 – 2026 will be published by Simon & Schuster on September 8th, 2026. A number of related events are currently being planned and will be added here as we get closer to the publication date.

Poet, writer, and activist.

Bibliography

What You Have Heard Is True

In the Lateness of the World

Blue Hour

The Country Between Us

Events & Readings

Media Kit

Literary Agent: