Wheelbarrow Books Presents: Carolyn Forché and Brad Johnson

Wed, March 26, 2025 7:00 PM at RCAH Theater, Snyder-Phillips Hall, 361 Physics Rd, East Lansing

Part of our Witness Remember Resist: A Spring Poetry Festival

 

The Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Series, established in 2016, is the publishing imprint of the RCAH Center for Poetry, with publication and distribution by MSU Press. 

Please join us as we welcome Brad Johnson, author of Smuggling Elephants Through Airport Security, and special guest Carolyn Forché, who selected Smuggling Elephants as winner of the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and author of Gathering the Tribes (winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize), The Country Between Us, and the memoir What You Have Heard Is True, among many others.

Johnson and Forché will each read from their work, then join in a conversation lightly moderated by Wheelbarrow Books Series Editor and Center for Poetry Founding Director Anita Skeen.

A reception and book signing will follow in the LookOut Gallery, 2nd floor, Snyder Hall.

 

Public parking is free after 6 p.m. in lot 9 (located across Physics Rd. from Snyder-Phillips Hall) and in non-metered spaces and spaces unmarked by permit signs around Snyder-Phillips Hall. Click here to view a detailed map including accessible parking and entrances.

 

 

Renowned as a “poet of witness,” 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. Carolyn Forché is Lannan Visiting Professor of Poetry and Professor of English at Georgetown University, and lives in Maryland with her husband, Photographer Harry Mattison.

 

Michigan-born poet Brad Johnson’s second book Smuggling Elephants Through Airport Security (Michigan State University Press) was selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Work of his has also been accepted by Carolina Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, J Journal, Meridian, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry and others. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami and teaches at Palm Beach State College.