Charles Wright is the recipient of national awards for his poetry, including the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music (Wesleyan) and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1998 for Black Zodiac (Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which also won the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Critic's Circle Prize, and the Ambassador Book Award. He is the author of many books of poems and essays, including Buffalo Yoga (2004), A Short History of the Shadow (2002), Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2001), Appalachia (1998), all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-87 (University of Michigan, 1989), a collection of essays and interviews. 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, and Princeton University. He is currently the Souder Family Professor at 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 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.