10/09/2025
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist, and feminist whose work reshaped modern literature and thought.
Born in Baltimore and educated at Radcliffe, she won the Yale Younger Poets Award at just 21, chosen by W. H. Auden for her debut A Change of World.
Her early formal verse gave way to bold, political work in the 1960s and ’70s. Her groundbreaking collection Diving into the Wreck (1973) won the National Book Award, which she famously accepted on behalf of “all women who have been silenced.”
Rich’s essays, including Of Woman Born, helped define second-wave feminism, while her later poetry fused the personal and political with unmatched moral clarity. She came out as a le***an in the 1970s and lived with writer Michelle Cliff.
Known for her integrity, Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, protesting inequality and the misuse of art for politics. Across more than two dozen books, she gave language to awakening — the shock of consciousness and the courage to live by it.
