Charles Wright

Charles Wright studied at Christ School. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are poetry. Employment is recorded with University of Virginia. Distinctions recorded are Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award and United States Poet Laureate.

• Name — Charles Wright • Born — 25 August 1935 • Birthplace — Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, U.S. • Education — Davidson College (BA) University of Iowa (MFA) • Genre — Poetry • Spouse — Holly McIntire • Awards — Pulitzer Prize for Poetry National Book Award for Poetry

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, and attended 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 went to the University of Virginia in 1983, where he stayed until he retired in 2010. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Wright began writing poetry while stationed in Italy during his army service, from 1957 to 1961, in the United States Army Intelligence Corps in Verona. 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.

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.

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). Black Zodiac (1997) won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize.