C.D. Wright (1949—2016) was the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose. Her awards include the National Book Critics Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize, as well as fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation. Her book One With Others [a little book of her days] was a finalist for the National Book Award. According to her estate, “Poetry itself, for C.D, was that which liberates us by dodging categorization. ‘It may be that because poetry is the most difficult to pin to the wall,’ she said, ‘it has a chance of a future.’ And perhaps this is why C.D. is so delightfully hard to pin to the wall, because she, like poetry, lived freely and variously and fully engaged with others and the world.” C.D. Wright was born and raised in Mountain Home, Arkansas and was a graduate of the University of Arkansas MFA program in Creative Writing & Translation. Over her lifetime she lived in Arkansas, Mexico, San Francisco, New York, and Rhode Island, where she served as the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University for thirty-three years. Her influences were broad, as was her influence. She dramatically advanced L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, docupoetics, feminist poetics, ecopoetry, and the Southern idiom, and she became known for challenging herself to write in new ways with every book. A treasured wife and mother, C.D. Wright belonged, in the words of The New York Times, “to a school of exactly one.” Learn more.

Photo of c.d. wright by Forrest Gander. Used with permission.