Born in Baltimore in 1929, Adrienne Rich is considered one of America's most distinguished poets. A graduate of Radcliffe College in 1951, she was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, a prize that led to her first publication "A Change of World." The contest judge was none other than poet W.H. Auden.

In 1952, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Europe. In 1953, she married Harvard University professor and economist Alfred H. Conrad.

In 1955, her second volume of poetry called "The Diamond Cutters" was published. However, it wasn't until her third book of poetry, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" in 1963 that Rich received any national recognition.

Rich became estranged from her husband in 1969 and her former husband Conrad would commit suicide the following year. Rich then became an active participant in the women's liberation movement from this point forward.

Her somewhat militant feminist position led to her self-declaration as a lesbian. In 1976, she published what is still considered her groundbreaking volume "Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution." Since that year, Rich has been living in California with her partner and poet Michelle Cliff.

Rich has published more than sixteen volumes of poetry and another four books of nonfiction prose. Her popularity is seen by the translation of her work into German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, and Japanese.

During her lengthy and stellar career, Rich has been awarded numerous fellowships, and prizes. Among the many notable awards are the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for Poetry , the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

The radical Rich actually refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, insisting she could never accept such an award from the Clinton administration because of its cynical politics.

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power