Charles Wright

Charles Wright is the much-lauded author of more than 25 volumes of verse, essays, and translations. Born in rural Tennessee in 1935, he first studied poetry while stationed in Italy with the U.S. Army. Wright attended Davidson (N.C.) College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Wright’s first major collection of poems, The Grave of the Right Hand (1970), showed the strong influence of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and received positive critical attention. The Southern Cross (1981) proved to be a critical, popular, and personal breakthrough, and was followed by such volumes as The Other Side of the River (1984), A Short History of the Shadow (2002), Scar Tissue (2006), and Caribou (2014). The trilogy Negative Blue consisted of the books Chickamauga (1995), Black Zodiac (1997), and Appalachia (1998).

From 2014 to 2015, Wright served as Poet Laureate of the United States. Among his lifetime of honors are a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award (both for Black Zodiac in 1997), a National Book Award (for Country Music: Selected Early Poems in 1983), a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Library of Congress’s award for lifetime achievement in poetry. In 2015 he received the second annual Charles E. Burchfield Award from the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

Wright was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2003 and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for many years.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Poetry Foundation (sample poems, audio and video clips, and a biography)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/charles-wright#about

Library of Congress Webguide (extensive links)
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/wright/

PBS Newshour (2011 video segment and transcript)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment-jan-june11-charleswright_03-01/

Time (2014 profile and video segment)
http://time.com/2864086/who-is-charles-wright-the-new-poet-laureate/