buygay.com

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is a American poet, essayist, and feminist known for her civil rights and anti-war activism.

Daughter of Arnold Rice Rich, Adrienne Rich attended Radcliffe College, focusing on poetry. In 1951, her senior year, senior poet W.H. Auden selected Rich's first poetry collection, A Change of World, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Upon graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Award.

In 1953, Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, a Harvard University professor with whom she had three sons. However, their marriage disintegrated in the 1960s, and Rich wrote a more personal work entitled Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in which she examined her female identity. She came out as a lesbian in 1976, the year she published her controversial work Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

Since then, Adrienne Rich has published more than sixteen volumes of poetry and four nonfiction prose books, including A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996 - 2008, The School Among the Ruins, Fox: Poems 1998-2000, and Midnight Salvage. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, such as the National Book Award for Poetry and the National Medal of Arts (which she refused for political reasons).