Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935 and educated at both Davidson College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned his MFA. He is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry, two books of essays, and three translations. His collection Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) was awarded the 2013 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry from Yale University. Also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Scar Tissue (2006) was the international winner for the Griffin Poetry Prize; his 1997 collection Black Zodiac won both a Pulitzer Prize and the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and Chickamauga (1995) won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His many additional honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal, the National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for a lifetime accomplishment in poetry, and in 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia and was appointed the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in June 2014.  

Photo by Holly Wright