Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Charles Wright studied at Davidson College and served in the U.S. Army before earning an MFA from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia. Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Country Music: Selected Early Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1982) received the National Book Award. He won the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2014 to 2015.
