Charles Wright (born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee) is a poet whose work engages landscape — particularly the Southern Appalachian mountains and Laguna Beach, California — with meditative attention to mortality, memory, and spiritual longing. He 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. His trilogy Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things, and Negative Blue earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) and the National Book Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982). He received the Bollingen Prize and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2014 to 2015.