Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950. She has taught at several universities, and is now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’.

Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), drew on her experiences in El Salvador during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (due out in 2014).

Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published by W.W. Norton in 1993, and her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).