Charles Wright

Charles Wright was born in Pickwick, Tennessee on August 25th 1935. He spent his youth and early adulthood in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. In 1957, Wright went to Davidson College where he earned his bachelor's degree. He then joined the U.S. Army where he served in the army intelligence unit for four years.

While Wright was stationed in Verona, Italy, he began reading the poetry by Ezra Pound and Eugenio Monte. Ezra Pound's poem, "Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula" moved Wright to experiment writing his own poems.

Upon returning to the U.S in 1961, Wright joined the University of Iowa where he then attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and earned his Masters degree in 1963. He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Rome, 1963-65, as well as a Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Padua, 1968-69.

Wright has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 for Black Zodiac. Other works include Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight. Wright's 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. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and currently resides Charlottesville, Virginia where he works as a full time professor at University of Virginia. Full Biography.

Alumni |Iowa Writers' Workshop
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