Join us Thursday, October 12, at 8 pm, for the 53rd annual Steloff Lecture delivered by writer and human rights activist Carolyn Forché. Forché will lecture and be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. Forché is regarded as one of the country’s leading poets, winner of dozens of major awards, including The Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, the Lannan Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The Lamont Poetry Prize, The Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace Activism, and others. She will respond to audience questions and will sign books following the presentation.

About Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her most recent collection is In the Lateness of the World. She is also the author of the memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019), a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others, which was nominated for the 2019 National Book Awards. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice,” and is followed by the 2014 anthology The Poetry of Witness. In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture.

About the Steloff Lecture

Skidmore’s annual Frances Steloff Lecture honors the work of a major literary figure. The Steloff Lecture series was established in 1967 at Skidmore by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs, founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, and well-known patron of writers. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Notable Steloff speakers have included five Nobel Prize winners and dozens of the world’s most important writers. Previous Steloff honorees include Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, John Banville, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others.

The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College and is free and open to the public.