POET

Adrienne Rich (1929 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Adrienne Rich, born in Baltimore, Maryland, is a leading American poet with nineteen volumes of poetry and four books of essays. Rich was at the forefront of the feminist movement and brought her politics into poetry. She gained early fame when W.H. Auden selected A Change of World as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1951. Since then, she has won numerous awards including the National Book Award and the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force. Her poetry loosened up with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), her language less formal and more intimate. Diving into the Wreck (1973) was another pivotal volume in her growing sense of the communal value of poetry. As her career progressed, she developed a strong feminist, political, and lesbian voice in books such as The Dream of a Common Language (1978) and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981). For many years she has lived and taught in California.