Carolyne Wright has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent collection, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), was nominated for the LA Times Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Idaho Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. It won the 2007 Independent Book Publishers Bronze Award for Poetry, and was reviewed in The Iowa Review 38/1, and in The Cortland Review: http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/08/spring/rigsbee_r.html
Wright's other recent collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington UP/Lynx House Books, 2nd edition 2005), won the Blue Lynx Prize, Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry, and American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Other books include Premonitions of an Uneasy Guest (AWP Award Series), Stealing the Children (Ahsahta Press), an invitational chapbook, Carolyne Wright: Greatest Hits 1975-2001 (Pudding House); a collection of essays, A Choice of Fidelities: Lectures and Readings from a Writer's Life (Ashland Poetry Press); and volumes of poetry translated from Spanish and Bengali. Just published is the anthology Majestic Nights: Love Poems of Bengali Women (White Pine Press, 2008).
Wright's ongoing investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International Quarterly. She spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground, which received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and an NEA Fellowship in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.
A graduate of Seattle University’s Humanities Honors Program with a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, Wright has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Seattle Arts Commission, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She has held visiting creative writing posts at Radcliffe, Sweet Briar College, Emory U, U of Wyoming, U of Miami, Oklahoma State U, U of Central Oklahoma, U of Oklahoma, The College of Wooster, and Cleveland State U., and taught writing at high schools, senior centers, community arts centers, and writing programs, conferences and festivals such as Seattle’s Bumbershoot, Cleveland State U's Imagination/2, Geraldine R. Dodge Festival, Fall for the Book, the Frost Place, Mountain Writers Center, Naropa, Poets & Writers League of Greater Cleveland, Poets in the Park, San Miguel Poetry Week, Richard Hugo House, Santa Fe Writers Conference, and "Desert Nights, Rising Stars," the Arizona State U Writers Conference. Wright is Translation Editor of Artful Dodge, and served on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) for 2004-2008. In 2005 she returned to her native Seattle, where she is on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, and teaches. In 2008, she is Thornton Poet in Residence at Lynchburg College, and Distinguished Northwest Poet at Seattle University.
