James Arlington Wright was born on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns. The subjects of Wright’s earlier books,
The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and
Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society for such reasons as poverty and sexual orientation, and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with
The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963). Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and, the following year, his
Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Wright died in New York City on March 25, 1980. (
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