Partner Michelle Cliff
Queer Places:
Cornell University (Ivy League), 410 Thurston Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Smith College (Seven Sisters), 9 Elm St, Northampton, MA 01063
Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham, MA 02453, Stati Uniti
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Adrienne
Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American
poet, essayist and radical feminist. She was called "one of the most widely
read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",[1][2]
and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the
forefront of poetic discourse."[3] A poet, author, feminist, and teacher (Radcliffe College, B.A., 1951), Rich, who won the Yale Younger Poets Award with the publication of her first book in 1951, has published eleven books of poetry and four of prose. She has received many additional awards, taught writing and women's studies at a number of colleges, and lectured on feminism at conferences and universities in the U.S. and abroad.
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by
renowned poet
W. H.
Auden for the
Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the
introduction to the published volume. She famously declined the
National Medal of Arts, protesting the vote by
House Speaker
Newt Gingrich to end funding for the
National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1976, Rich began her partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor
Michelle Cliff, which lasted until her death. In her controversial work
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the
same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well
as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in
me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."[9]
The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into
the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the
first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing, themes
which run throughout her work afterwards, especially in A Wild Patience Has
Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a
Doorframe (2001).[21]
In her analytical work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell
suggests these works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she
(Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new
relationship with the universe".[22]
During this period, Rich also wrote a number of key socio-political essays,
including "Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", one of the first to address the
theme of lesbian existence.[9]
In this essay, she asks "how and why women's choice of women as passionate
comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed,
invalidated, forced into hiding".[9]
Some of the essays were republished in
On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). In
integrating such pieces into her work, Rich claimed her sexuality and took a
role in leadership for sexual equality.[9]
Featured in
Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay
and Lesbian Writers by Robert Giard [Rights Notice: Copyright Jonathan G. Silin (jsilin@optonline.net)]
From 1976 to 1979, Rich taught at City College as well as
Rutgers University as an English Professor. In 1979, she received an
honorary doctorate from Smith College and moved with Cliff to Montague, MA.
Ultimately, they moved to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued her career as a
professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist. Rich and Cliff took over editorship
of the lesbian arts journal
Sinister Wisdom (1981–1983).[23][24]
Rich taught and lectured at
UC Santa Cruz,
Scripps College,
San Jose State University, and
Stanford University during the 1980s and 1990s.[24]
From 1981 to 1987, Rich served as an A.D. White Professor-At-Large for
Cornell University.[25]
Rich published several volumes in the next few years: Your Native Land,
Your Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time’s
Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989). She also was awarded the Ruth Paul Lilly
Poetry Prize (1986), the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from
NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service
to the Art of Poetry (1989).[10][17]
Rich died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California
home. Her son, Pablo Conrad, reported that her death resulted from long-term
rheumatoid arthritis.[38]
Her last collection was published the year before her death. Rich was
survived by her sons, two grandchildren[39]
and her partner
Michelle Cliff.[40]
My published books:
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