Carolyn Forché is one of the first poets to receive the Wyndham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Library at Yale University. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Academy of Literature.
Her first volume of poetry, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. In 2020, Penguin Press published her fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
While at MacDowell, Forché wrote a substantial new beginning for her memoir-in-progress, Music for Cello and Ash, discovering a narrative voice and structure that had previously eluded her. Sections written before the residency fell into place, and the book coalesced for the first time into more than the sum of its parts. The forests and meadows of MacDowell also entered the work as a meditative setting, and she felt free to write as the self she has become at age seventy-five. The weeks at MacDowell were among the most productive of her writing life.
