One of the most renowned modern American poets, Baltimore-born Adrienne Rich is also known as a theorist and women’s rights activist on issues concerning sexuality, race, language, power, gay rights and women’s culture. A winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize upon her graduation from Radcliffe in 1951 for her first book, A Change of World, Rich went on to publish a number of renowned volumes of poetry, including her landmark Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), which defined her early poetic style (bearing the influence of Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden, but also of the cinematic techniques of jump cuts and collage) and her themes exploring the relation of poetry to power and gender. In New York, she taught remedial English for poor, underprivileged and minority students entering college, but ultimately devoted herself to the women’s movement and the investigation of sexual politics. Although previously married to Alfred Conrad and a mother of three, she came out in 1976, when she moved in with her partner, the writer and editor Michelle Cliff.

In 1981, Rich received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force. Her poetry has been honoured with the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck (which she accepted jointly with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde in the name of all women), as well as a large number of other awards. She is active in movements for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and for the progressive Jewish movement New Jewish Agenda. As she herself said: “I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men—insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea—have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included” (www.womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/a/qu_adriennerich.htm). It was the same pro-women, anti-war rationale that led her to refuse the National Medal of Arts in 1997 as a protest against the “cynical politics” of the Clinton administration, and to snub the White House symposium on poetry in 2003.