Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, essayist and human rights activist. She is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), and Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash, Amira el-Zein and others). She compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton & Co., 1993) and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship and other literary and teaching awards, including the Robert Creeley Award in 2005 and The Golden Rose from the New England Poetry Club in 2008. She has been a human rights activist for thirty years, and in 1998, was presented the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture. In 2004 she became a trustee of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, Canada’s premier poetry award. She serves as Executive Vice President of Cities of Refuge, North America. Forthcoming books include a memoir, a book of essays and a fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World. She has taught poetry and literature for thirty-five years, and holds the Lannan Chair of Poetry and Poetics at Georgetown University, where she also directs The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.