Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

National Book Award
1974
Bollingen Prize
2003

Griffin Poetry Prize
2010

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Read more about Adrienne Rich:  Selected Awards and Honors

Famous quotes by adrienne rich:

    “Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “These are the things that we have learned to do
    Who live in troubled regions.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “A life I didn’t choose
    chose me: even
    my tools are the wrong ones
    for what I have to do.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write, on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too ‘political,’ ‘merely’ oral and thus unreliable.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)