In Praise of What is Missing

Charles Wright is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry, two books of essays, and three books of translations. His collection of selected poems, Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright , was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2019. His collection Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) was awarded the 2013 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry from Yale University. Also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux are the books Scar Tissue (2006), the international winner for the Griffin Poetry Prize; Black Zodiac (1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize and the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry; and Chickamauga (1995), which won the 1996 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His additional honors include the 1992 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal in Poetry, the 1974 National Book Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for a lifetime accomplishment in poetry, and in 1999, he was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Virginia and was appointed the 2014–2015 United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Wright holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Photo by Holly Wright