Charles Wright is the author of many books of poems and essays, most recently Caribou (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), Bye–and–Bye: Selected Late Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), which won the Bollingen Prize, Outtakes (Sarabande Books, 2010), and Sestets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). He is the recipient of the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1991) and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1998 for Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), which also won the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ambassador Book Award. Wright has translated the work of Dino Campana and received the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems (Oberlin, 1978). He has taught at the University of California–Irvine, the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia. His many awards and honors include an Ingram Merrill Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Grant, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets’ Edgar Allan Poe Award. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1995.  

Photo by Holly Wright