Carolyn Forché Presents “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance”

Poet, editor, translator, and activist Carolyn Forché joins us at Greenlight for a reading and discussion of her new memoir What You Have Heard Is True. The book is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life when he invites her to El Salvador to learn about his troubled country. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she’s experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. “In this searing, vital memoir, Carolyn Forché at last reveals the dark stories behind her famous early poems: she brings alive the brutality, complexity and idealism of El Salvador in the late 1970s, a time of revolution that echoes all too painfully in the present” (Claire Messud).