C.D. Wright, author of over a dozen books, passed away on January 12, 2016 at her home in Barrington, Rhode Island. She was 67. According to a press release from her publisher, Copper Canyon, a cause has yet to be determined.

Wright’s work, including the volumes, Deep Step Come Shining, Steal Away, and One Big Self, a documentary text about the lives of Louisiana inmates with photographs by Deborah Luster, earned her tremendous accolades. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award, among others. Her book, One With Others (2010), won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2013. Praising her election, Anne Waldman said, “Brilliantly astute, generous, witty, panoramic, celebratory, C.D. Wright is one of our most fearless writers, possessed with an urgency that pierces through the darkness of our time. She carries a particular Southern demographic that bears witness, that investigates history, humanity, and consciousness in powerfully innovative, often breathtaking language. Hers is a necessary poetics, on fire with life and passion for what matters.”

AWP Executive Director David Fenza remembered her this way: “Twenty-five years ago, C.D. Wright was the first person, I heard, to use the phrase, ‘American poetries,’ as a purposeful polemic—to say the poetry was pluralistic and that multiplicity was a good thing, and that all these various camps striving for domination should just get over themselves and embrace the diversity of poetics. Hers was an original, powerful voice in poetry. Serving on grant-making panels and in other community services, she had a generous heart, and she was a beloved teacher.”

Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, on January 6, 1949. She received a BA from Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and an MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1976. After living in New York and San Francisco, she moved to Rhode Island in 1983. Wright taught for many years at Brown University, an AWP member program, where she was the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts. AWP featured her as a presenter at its conferences in 2012 (Chicago) and 2007 (Atlanta). She also served as Rhode Island State Poet Laureate from 1994–1999, and with her husband, writer Forrest Gander, ran Lost Roads Publishers for over twenty years.

Her newest book, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, a collection of lyric essays she referred to as “prosemetrics,” was just released last week. The book is intended as a companion to her earlier volume, Cooling Time. A further volume of poems, ShallCross, is slated for publication later this year.

“Poetry is a necessity of life,” Wright said. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.”

She is survived by her husband and their son, Brecht.

Photo: C.D. Wright reading at the 2007 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Atlanta.