Adrienne Rich

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. Besides sixteen volumes of poetry, her prose works include Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; the essay collections On Lies, Secrets and Silence and Blood, Bread and Poetry; What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, new edition 2003) and Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001). 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, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She has lived in New England, New York City, and since 1984 in California. She has three sons and two grandchildren and has lived for thirty years with the writer Michelle Cliff.