Charles Wright

Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th poet laureate of the United States.

Early life and education

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 William Faulkner had written. He then matriculated at Davidson College and graduated with a BA in history in 1957. He received a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1963, He went to the University of Virginia in 1983, where he stayed until he retired in 2010. He retired from the position in May 2015.

Works Besides the award-winning books Country Music (1982) and Black Zodiac (1997), Wright has published Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight. His work also appears in Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts.

Wright has published two works of criticism, Halflife and Quarter Notes.

Recognition His translation of Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Poems won him the PEN Translation Prize in 1979. In 1993, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement. His poetry collection The World of the Ten Thousand Things was included by critic Harold Bloom in his list of works constituting the Western Canon. In 1996, he won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the collection Chickamauga (1995). finalist, 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry