Charles Wright was born in Tennessee in 1935 and was educated at Davidson College and the University of Iowa.
His books include Sestets: Poems (2010); Littlefoot: A Poem (2008); Scar Tissue (2007), which was the international winner for the Griffin Poetry Prize; Buffalo Yoga (2005); Negative Blue (2001); Appalachia (1999), winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Black Zodiac (1998), which won the L.A. Times Book Prize; Chickamauga (1996), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990; Zone Journals (1989); Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982), which won the National Book Award; Hard Freight (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award; among others.
He has also written two volumes of criticism: Halflife (1989) and Quarter Notes (1996). Charles Wright has also translated the work of Dino Campana in Orphic Songs (1984) as well as Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems (1978), which was awarded the PEN Translation Prize.
His many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and in 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently works as a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
His poem “It’s Turtles All The Way Down” appeared in Issue 9.2 Summer/Fall 1997.
