Editor’s Note: All this week we’ll continue posting micro-portraits and/or interesting news about this year’s 2013 presenters at The State of the Book Literary Symposium, which will take place in Ann Arbor on Saturday, September 28, in Rackham Auditorium. All events are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule or list of presenters, please check out the State of the Book Website. Thank you!

“It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another”
When The Country Between Us came out in 1981, death squads terrorized El Salvador. Forché’s book gives the images of human atrocity in that small country that were absent from the news reports: severed ears like dried peaches, the sound of scythes, death pits.
“I tried not to write about El Salvador in poetry, because I thought it might be better to do so in journalistic articles,” Forché told Jonathan Cott in a Rolling Stone interview. “But I couldn’t–the poems just came.”
Listen to Carolyn Forché read her poem “The Colonel” aloud.

Along with the Zell Visiting Writers Series, the English Department, and Fiction Writers Review, The State of the Book is sponsored by the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Institute for the Humanities, Rackham Graduate College, Office of the Vice President for Research, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, MLibrary, the Undergraduate English Association, and the Hopwood Program.