C. D. Wright
| Carolyn D. Wright | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Carolyn Doris Wright January 6, 1949 Mountain Home, Arkansas |
| Died | January 12, 2016 (aged 67) Barrington, Rhode Island |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Memphis, University of Arkansas |
| Occupation | poet, professor |
| Known for | MacArthur Fellowship |
Carolyn D. "C. D." Wright (January 6, 1949 – January 12, 2016) was an American poet.
C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, to a chancery judge and a court reporter. She earned a BA in French from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue an MFA from the University of Arkansas, which she received in 1976. Her poetry thesis was titled Alla Breve Loving.
In 1977, the publishing company founded by Frank Stanford, Lost Roads Publishers, published Wright's first collection, Room Rented by A Single Woman. After Stanford died in 1978, Wright took over Lost Roads, continuing its mission of publishing new poets and starting the practice of publishing translations. In 1979, she moved to San Francisco, where she met poet Forrest Gander. Wright and Gander married in 1983 and had a son, Brecht. The husband and wife were co-editors at Lost Roads until 2005.
In 1981, Wright and Gander moved to Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, where she completed her third book of poems, Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues. In 1983, they moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where she began teaching at Brown University as the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English. Over the next 30 years, Wright won many major American literary prizes (including fellowships from the Lila Wallace, Guggenheim, Lannan, and MacArthur Foundations) while publishing one of the most eclectic bodies of poetic work of her generation. The cyclical erotic and tormented fragments of Just Whistle are as distinct from the compressed, sensual ntarratives of Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues as from the lyrical southern paeans of Further Adventures with You. Perhaps her most original and internationally influential publications are the book-length works Deepstep Come Shining, One Big Self, and One With Others. Each developed, in new directions, Wright’s formally innovative and fundamentally ethical meditations on the South, on race relations, on incarceration, and on the lives of the unsung. Together, those books helped to define and extend the possibilities for documentary poetics in the 21st century. In 2013, Wright was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.Stephen Burt has described her as an Elliptical Poet, but he did not use that description in an essay he published as a tribute to Wright just after her death. As Joel Brouwer has said, she "belongs to a school of exactly one."
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