Works by
Carolyn Forché
(Editor, Poet, Translator)
[April 28, 1950 - ]

As Editor

• Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs (2001, 2008) with Philip Gerard
  Writing Creative Nonfiction presents more than thirty essays on today's hottest literary form--creative nonfiction. The stellar line-up of contributors includes Philip Lopate, William Least-Heat Moon, Diane Ackerman, Ted Conover, Dinty Moore and many others. From researching ideas and structuring the story, to reportage and personal reflection, this book covers every key element of the craft. Each essay is followed by three exercises for hands-on learning.

  • An impressive line up of the best teachers from the finest writing programs throughout the country

  • Creative nonfiction titles are hot--with new books hitting the bestseller lists everyday!

  • The AWP's role guarantees strong consumer and academic interest

Anthologies

• Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993)
  This landmark anthology takes its impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecht: "In the dark times, will there be singing? /Yes, there will be singing./About the dark times." Bearing witness to extremity--whether of war, torture, exile, or repression--this volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, a chorus of voices from dark times, giving testimony to the poetic imagination seared by the fire of human suffering.

Biography/Memoirs

• The Horse on Our Balcony (2010 release)

Essays

• Book of Essays (2011 release)

Non-fiction

• History and Motivations of U.S. Involvement in the Control of the Peasant Movement in El Salvador: The Role of AIFLD in the Agrarian Reform Process, 1970-1980 (1980)

Poetry

• Blue Hour (2003)

• The Angel of History (1994)
  Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forché's ambitions and compelling third collection of poems is a meditation of memory, specifically how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented discordant. But read together, these lines, become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. As poets have always done, Forché attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, and link the past with the future.

• The Country Between Us (1981)

• Gathering the Tribes (1976)

Other

• Carolyn Forche's "The Garden Shukkei-en": A Study Guide from Gale's "Poetry for Students" (Volume 18, Chapter 8) (2003, Digital - Download: PDF)

• Carolyn Forche (1994, VHS Tape)
  The Lannan Foundation is dedicated to cultural creativity and diversity through its programs, which identify and support exceptional contemporary artists, writers and indigenous communities. Carolyn Forche, the author of three books of poems, meditates in her work on the brutalities and injustices of the 20th century. She edited the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which is a testimony to the work of poets from five continents who have lived in extreme situations, from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square. Ms. Forche, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, read the entire text of The Angel of History on May 24, 1994, in Los Angeles.

• Women in the Labor History, 1825-1935: An Annotated Bibliography (1972), Carolyn Forché, Martha Jane Soltow, and Murray Massre, eds.

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