Overview

We are honoured to have two esteemed poets from the US to share new work and discuss themes of creative practice, refuge and human rights.

Carolyn Forché is the author of five poetry collections. Her most recent, In the Lateness of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the American Book Award. Her memoir, What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance was a finalist for the National Book Award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize and others, and won the Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, was praised by Nelson Mandela as “a blow against tyranny.” She completed her doctorate at Newcastle University in 2021. She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, Notes from the North, Private Property, and Disorient: Fugues & Assimilamentations, which is forthcoming. She is 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Gladstone Library, Wales, 2025 Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House, Stonington, and serves as a Trustee for Connect: North Korea, formerly the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea, a charity based in New Malden, Surrey, home to the largest community of North Koreans in the world outside Asia.

Patricia Smith, recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, is the author of Unshuttered, a volume of dramatic monologues accompanied by images of 19th-century African Americans; Incendiary Art (winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets), and Blood Dazzler (a National Book Award finalist). Smith is a professor in the Lewis Centre for the Arts at Princeton University, a formed Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, an Adademy of American Poets Chancellor and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.