Adrienne Rich Overview

Poet Adrienne Rich grew up in Baltimore and attended Radcliffe College. In 1951, the same year of her college graduation, she received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book of poetry, A Change of World. She finished... [more]

Poet Adrienne Rich grew up in Baltimore and attended Radcliffe College. In 1951, the same year of her college graduation, she received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first book of poetry, A Change of World. She finished her second book, The Diamond Cutters (1955), early on in her marriage to Alfred Conrad, Harvard Economist. A shift toward the radical began eight years later with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), a volume about the difficulties of wifehood and motherhood in the 1950s. Her subsequent books Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) engaged the rising political energy of the Vietnam era. Diving into the Wreck (1973), a critique of Western culture that remains one of Rich's most influential achievements, received the National Book Award in 1974. Rich has continued to grapple with womanhood, intellectualism, and activism in her poetry. Her collections published after Diving into the Wreck include The Dream of a Common Language (1978), The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (1984), Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995), and Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001). Her 2004 collection, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004, won the Book Critics Circle Award. Rich, who has taught at both San Jose State University and Stanford, still lives and works in Northern California. [show less]