Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929. Since the selection in 1951 of her first volume, A Change of World, by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, her work evolved from closed forms to a poetics of change, rooted in a radical imagination and politics. Her work has received many awards including the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She has three sons and two grandchildren and has lived for thirty years with the writer Michelle Cliff.