photo copyright © Dorothy Alexander

C. D. Wright was born in 1949 in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She received a B.A. degree from Memphis State College and an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas.

She has published numerous volumes of poetry including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press, 2005); Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), with photographer Deborah Luster; Deepstep Come Shining (1998); Tremble (1996); Just Whistle (1993); String Light (1991), which won the Poetry Center Book Award; Further Adventures with You (1986); and Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues (1981). She has also published two state literary maps, one for Arkansas, her native state, and one for Rhode Island, her adopted state.

"Poetry is a necessity of life," Wright has said. "It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so."

Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, as well as awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Witter Bynner Prize, and a Whiting Award. In 1994 she was named Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, a five-year post. With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. Wright teaches at Brown University near Providence, Rhode Island.