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.

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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