Human rights activist-poet coming to LTCC

Poet, professor, and human rights activist Carolyn Forché will be at Lake Tahoe Community College on May 28.

Forché will read selections from her works, answer audience questions, and sign copies of her books, which will be available for sale.

Forché’s first poetry collection, “Gathering the Tribes” (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and was then published by Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. She then received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, “The Country Between U”s (1981), received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. In 1998, Forché received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and her work on the preservation of memory and culture.

Other books include a memoir, “The Horse on Our Balcony” (2010, HarperCollins); a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins); and a fifth collection of poems, “In the Lateness of the World” (Bloodaxe Books, due out this year). Forché is perhaps best known for her famed international anthology, “Against Forgetting” (1993), which was praised by Nelson Mandela as “a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.”

LTCC’s Writers’ Series is committed to providing a cultural outlet for students and the community by hosting free readings, discussions, craft talks and workshops with nationally known, award-winning authors, as well as poetry slams, open mic nights and student readings.

The free event is at 7pm in the board room.