KickstART Farmington and the Farmington Community Library are pleased to present the 2024 Farmington Author & Book Festival (FAB) on Saturday, June 1st, highlighted by a reading by the acclaimed poet and writer Carolyn Forché at 5 pm, followed by a conversation with poet Joy Gaines-Friedler.
Carolyn Forché grew up with her family in the Detroit area and in Farmington Township and graduated from Our Lady of Sorrows High School. In addition, she studied creative writing at Michigan State University and received an MFA from Bowling Green State University.
Since then, Forché has written five books of poetry, most recently In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and also Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and Gathering the Tribes (1976), winner of the Yale Series of Young Poets Prize.
She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award.
She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
All FAB Fest events are FREE and more information is available at: https://kickstartfarmington.org/fab-fest/
FAB Fest is generously sponsored by the Farmington Friends of the Library, The MacGuffin, a national literary journal produced at Schoolcraft College, Book Beat, and the Farmington & Farmington Hills Foundation for Youth & Families.