Carolyn Forché’s appearance is co-sponsored by the University of Houston-Downtown.
Reading followed by an on-stage interview – conducted by Houston author and UH Downtown faculty member Daniel Peña.
To order books by both authors at a discount click here.
To submit questions for authors that may become part of the onstage interview, click here.
For more information about the 2019/2020 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Series click here.
CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four poetry collections, including Blue Hour, The Angel of History, Gathering the Tribes, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and The Country Between Us, in which, according to Joyce Carol Oates, Forché “like Neruda, Philip Levine, Denise Levertov and others… addresses herself to the… world.” She is also editor of the groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, and a noted translator of poets as varied as Claribel Alegría, Georg Trakl, and Mahmoud Darwish. Forché comes to Houston to share her memoir What You Have Heard Is True—”astonishing, powerful, so important at this time” (Margaret Atwood)—which “narrates her role as witness in an especially explosive and precarious period in El Salvador’s history. This incredible book… marries the attentive sensibility of a master poet with the unflinching eyes of a human rights activist.” (Claudia Rankine)
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO’s “writing is always lyrical, the narration refreshingly direct, and the sex abundant” (Booklist), but with “a furious grace” (Kirkus) all her own. Her debut story collection Her Body and Other Parties is the “kind of book that will leave you haunted, and thrilled, by the possibilities of contemporary fiction” (Dallas Morning News) and “is full of repressed physical energy and the raw juice of annihilating female fury” (Louise Erdrich). Among its many honors, the book was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Machado will read from her new memoir about domestic abuse, In the Dream House, a dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that turns our ideas of what a memoir can do and be upside down.
