Rich, Adrienne, 1929-2012

Adrienne Cecile Rich, poet, author, feminist, and teacher, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, the daughter of Helen (Jones) and Arnold Rice Rich. She attended the Roland Park Country School in Baltimore, Md. (1938-47). A 1951 graduate of Radcliffe College, in that year she won the Yale Younger Poets Award with the publication of her first book, A Change of World . Following her studies at Oxford University (winter 1952-53), she traveled through Europe. The following decade saw her marriage to Harvard economist Alfred Haskell Conrad (June 26, 1953), the birth of three sons, David (b. 1955), Paul (b. 1957), and Jacob (b. 1959), and the appearance of a second book of verse, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (Harper & Row, 1955). In 1966, the Conrad family moved from Cambridge, Mass. to New York, N.Y

Rich is the author of eleven books of poetry --including Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (Harper & Row, 1963), Necessities of Life (Norton, 1966), Leaflets (Norton, 1969), The Will to Change (Norton, 1971), Diving into the Wreck (Norton, 1973), Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1975), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Thus Far (1981), The Fact of a Doorframe (Norton, 1984), Dark Fields of the Republic (Norton, 1995), Midnight Salvage: poems, 1995-1998 (Norton, 1999)--and four books of prose, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), and On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 . Diving into the Wreck won the National Book Award in 1974. Protesting the lack of women recipients, Rich rejected the award as an individual and accepted it in conjuction with the other nominees, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, in the name of all women. Her writings have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese. She was also the editor, with Michelle Cliff, of Sinister Wisdom (1981-83).

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