Blue Hour

Carolyn Forché (born in Detroit, Michigan) is a poet and human rights activist whose work has shaped the understanding of poetry as a literature of witness in the face of political violence. She studied at Justin Morrill College at Michigan State University and received her MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her second collection, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1981), drawing on her time in El Salvador during its civil war, won the Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection. Her long-awaited fourth collection, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020), won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Arts and Sciences. She edited the landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993). She is a professor at Georgetown University.