Language English Role Poet Name Charles Wright | Genre Poetry Nationality American | |
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Books Black Zodiac, Negative Blue: Selected, Country Music: Selected, A Short History of the Shad, Littlefoot: A Poem Similar People Mark Strand, Charles Simic, James Tate, Richard Howard, Sharon Olds | ||
Charles wright inaugural reading as poet laureate
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. In 2014-2015 he was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Contents
- Charles wright inaugural reading as poet laureate
- Charles wright 2014 15 u s poet laureate oct 13 2015 emory libraries
- Life
- Works
- References
Charles wright 2014 15 u s poet laureate oct 13 2015 emory libraries
Life
Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee. Wright attended Christ School (North Carolina) in Asheville for his junior and senior years where he helped coach football, served as vice president of his class, and became a member of the honors program. While at Christ School, he enveloped himself in the literature that would inspire him to write. By the time he graduated in 1953 he had read everything Faulkner had written. He then matriculated at Davidson College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sapienza University of Rome and at the University of Padua. From 1966 to 1983, he taught at the University of California, Irvine. Fellow Colleagues poets Robert Peters and James L. McMichael and novelist Oakley Hall shared during this time directorship of the university's well-known Master of Fine Arts program.
He is now a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. On June 12, 2014, the Library of Congress announced that Wright would serve as Poet Laureate of the United States beginning on September 25, 2014. He retired from the position in May 2015.
Works
Beside the award-winning books Country Music (1982) and Black Zodiac (1997), Wright has published Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight. His work also appears in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.
Wright has published two works of criticism, Halflife and Quarter Notes. His translation of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Poems won him the PEN Translation Prize in 1979. In 1993, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement.