Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012) was a distinguished American poet and feminist theorist born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Dr. Arnold Rice Rich, a pathology professor at Johns Hopkins, and Helen Jones Rich, a trained composer and pianist. Educated at home until fourth grade, then at Roland Park Country School, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1951. Her first poetry volume, A Change of World, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series (1951). She married economist Alfred Haskell Conrad in 1953, with whom she had three sons: David (1955), Paul (1957), and Jacob (1959). After moving to New York in 1966 where both taught at local universities, her marriage deteriorated and Conrad committed suicide in 1970. Rich's work evolved toward radical feminism, reflected in volumes including Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) and Diving into the Wreck, which won the National Book Award (1974). She came out as a lesbian in Twenty-One Love Poems (1976) and published her first prose work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). That same year, she entered a long-term relationship with Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, with whom she moved to Santa Cruz, California, in 1984. Rich is cited in bluegrass scholarship for her theoretical framework suggesting that women's absence in bluegrass reflects a restrained counterforce within the genre's cultural dynamics.
In the newsletter
- No. 8 Summer 1996