}PARA uPAR@ ` TEXT ` Rich, Adrienne Cecile1929╨ poet, essayist and activistBorn on May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland, Adrienne Rich was brought up in a household she describes as ╥white and middle-class ╔ full of books, with a father who encouraged me to write.╙ She was schooled at home by her mother, a composer and pianist, until the fourth grade. In 1951, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College. That same year, she published A Change of World, her first book of poetry, which the poet W. H. Auden selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award. Although she married in 1953 and had three sons in six years, she continued to write.Her early poetry is characterized by stylistic control and elegance, qualities she perfected in The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, 1955. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954╨1962, 1963, marks a shift toward a more feminist and political poetry. In 1966, she separated from her husband (who committed suicide in 1970). She taught in the SEEK (Seek Education, Elevation and Knowledge) English program at the City College of New York from 1968 to 1970, later becoming an instructor of creative writing and assistant professor of English. The poetry of Necessities of Life: Poems 1962╨1965, 1966, Selected Poems, 1967, Leaflets: Poems 1965╨1968, 1969, and The Will to Change: Poems 1969╨1970, 1971, reflects her involvement in the antiwar movement and the black civil rights struggle. In the early 1970s, her poetry took on the urgent tone of militant feminism with the publication of Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971╨1972, 1973, which won a National Book Award. Although Rich declined the award as an individual, she accepted it on behalf of all women and donated the cash to a charitable institution. Her activism led to the publication of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), a prose unmasking of motherhood as mired in patriarchal assumptions. In her monograph Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, 1980, Rich challenges the premises of the institution of heterosexuality. Her lesbianism figures prominently in her poetry of the late 1970s and 1980s. Twenty-One Love Poems, 1976, became a section of The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974╨1977, 1978; other collections include A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978╨1981, 1981, Sources, 1984, and The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950╨1984, 1984, and Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986. With poet Michelle Cliff, she edited Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian-feminist journal, from 1980╨1984. During this period she wrote copious essays about literature and lesbian feminism among many other issues, which are collected in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966╨1978, 1979, and Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979╨1986, 1986. These titles offer a perspective on the history of white feminism in the U.S. More recently Rich has explored oppression, violence, injustice, and anti-Semitism in Time╒s Power: Poems 1985╨88, 1989, and An Atlas of a Difficult World: Poems 1988╨1991, 1991. Her voice of courage informs What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993, a combination of social and cultural commentary, reflections on language and poetry, and the poets╒ creed╤composed in passionate, lyrical prose. She has won numerous awards, fellowships and prizes, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force, the Lambda Book Award, and the Poets╒ Prize. 6styl ` B ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ = !I │ !I ╞ !I } 5¬ ~ !I ▐ !I ß !I Γ !I !I
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