Charles Wright (poet)
| Charles Wright | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
August 25, 1935 Pickwick Dam, Tennessee |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Christ School (North Carolina) |
| Alma mater | Davidson College; Iowa Writers' Workshop |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Notable awards |
Pulitzer Prize for poetry; National Book Award for Poetry |
| Audio | |
|---|---|
 "Charles Wright Reads Selected Sestets and Other Poems" The New York Review of Books, 10 December 2009 |
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| Video | |
 Charles Wright, Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, March 26, 2013 |
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.
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.
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