March 29th, 2012
Baltimore native Adrienne Rich, an award-winning poet whose socially conscious work influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died at 82. She died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis.
Born in Baltimore in 1929, she had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s. Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book of poetry, A Change of World. She published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems Diving into the Wreck in 1974, when she read a statement written by herself and fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, “refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women.” In 1997, Rich refused President Clinton’s National Medal of Arts citing the administration’s “cynical politics.” Rich’s books have sold more than 750,000 copies.
Rich (right), with Audre Lorde (left) and Meridel Le Sueur (middle), 1980
