C. D. Wright was an award-winning contemporary American poet and academic.

Carolyn Doris Wright was born January 6, 1949, in Mountain Home, Arkansas, to Judge Ernie E. Wright and Alyce (Aline) E. Collins Wright. Wright graduated from Harrison High School in 1967. She earned a bachelor’s degree in French from Memphis State University in 1971 and a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Arkansas in 1976. After graduating, she lived in both New York and San Francisco, where she taught poetry at San Francisco State University from 1979-1981 before moving to Rhode Island and joining the faculty of Brown University, where she taught from 1983 until her death. In 1983, she married Forrest Gander; the couple had one son, Brecht Wright Gander.

Her first collection of poetry, Room Rented by a Single Woman, was published by Frank Stanford’s Lost Roads Publishers in 1977. After Stanford’s death, Wright and her husband took on responsibility for the press, which they served as co-editors for until 2005. Wright’s other published books of poetry include Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues (1982), Tremble (1996), Deepstep Come Shining (1998), Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008), One with Others (2010; National Book Critic’s Circle Award winner), and ShallCross (2016). She collaborated with Arkansas photographer Deborah Luster on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003) and The Lost Roads Project (1994).

In 1987, Harrison, Arkansas, declared “Carolyn Wright Day,” and she was named Boone County Poet Laureate; that same year, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Wright served as Poet Laureate of Rhode Island from 1994-1999. She won the Witter Brynner Prize for poetry, a Lannan Literary Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2004) and a Robert Creeley Award (2005). The Academy of American Poets welcomed her as a chancellor in 2013.

Wright passed away January 12, 2016, in Barrington, Rhode Island.