Lannan Foundation

C.D. Wright can be described in many ways: she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume.  Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

She has written ten volumes of poetry and recently published Cooling Time, a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay.  In it she writes, “Many writers maintain a guarded border between language thick with hair and twigs and the reified, rarified stuff.  No matter which side of the border poets live on, they tend to act as if they were being overrun.  All I want is a day pass.  I like to sleep in my own bed.” A recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, Wright is a professor of English at Brown University.  With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. 

Wright has collaborated on many projects with photographer Deborah Luster, the most recent being One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, which features photographs from the state’s prisons accompanied by poems inspired by Wright’s interviews with inmates.  Other projects with Luster include the compilation and publication of two state literary maps: one of her native state of Arkansas, the other of her adopted state, Rhode Island. 

C.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry, including two booklength poems, Deepstep Come Shining and Just Whistle. On a fellowship from the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Foundation, she curated “a walk-in book of Arkansas,” an exhibition which toured throughout her native state.

She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts.