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).

Rich has taught writing and women's studies at Swarthmore College (visiting poet, 1966-68), Columbia University (1967-69), the City College of New York (lecturing in the Seek Education, Elevation and Knowledge [SEEK] English Program, 1968-72, 1974-75), Brandeis University (Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor of Creative Literature, 1972-73), Douglass College, Rutgers University (1975-79), Cornell University (1981-87), Scripps College (1983-84), San Jose State (1984-85), Stanford University (1986-93), and University of Chicago (1989). She has also lectured on feminism at conferences and universities in the United States, Japan, France, and Great Britain.

The recipient of Guggenheim fellowships (1952, 1953 and again 1961-62), Rich also received a Bollingen Foundation grant for translation of Dutch poetry (1962), the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship (1963), a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1961), an NEA grant (1970), an Alumnae Recognition Award at Radcliffe's centennial (1979), and numerous other awards for poetry. In 1997, she turned down the National Medal for the Arts.

For more complete accounts of her life, see Contemporary Authors (first revision, vols. 9-12, 1974), World Authors: 1950-1970 (1975), Alone with America (196-) by Richard Howard, Five Temperments (1977) by David Kalstone, An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (1984) by Wendy Martin, Writing Beyond the Ending (1985) by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (1986) by Claire Keyes, and Who's Who of American Women (1999). For a more complete list, see Biographical and Genealogical Master Index .

From the guide to the Papers, 1927-1999, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)