October 1, 2018
5 PM, LC 317
Jay Wright is the author of several collections of poetry including: Disorientations: Groundings (Flood Editions, 2013); Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms, and Praise for Lois (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008); The Presentable Art of Reading Absence (2008); Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000); Boleros (1991).. He has also published dozen plays.
About Wright’s work, critic Harold Bloom has written, “As an immensely learned poet, Wright tries to defend himself against incessant allusiveness by stripping his diction, sometimes to an astonishing sparseness… His most characteristic art returns always to that commodious lyricism I associate with American poetry at its most celebratory, in Whitman, in Stevens, in Crane, in Ashbery.”
Wright’s honors include the 2000 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship, and the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award.
He was the recipient of the 1996 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Wright was named the 2005 recipient of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He lives in Bradford, Vermont.