Franz Wright is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry including Ill Lit: New and Selected
Poems (1998), The Beforelife (2001), Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003), and God's Silence
(2006). He is also the translator of work by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
In 2004 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Walking to Martha's Vineyard. He is the recipient
of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for poetry. The son of poet James Wright, he began
writing as a teenager. When he sent his first poem to his father, who was no longer living with
the family, James Wright wrote back: "You're a poet. Welcome to hell." James and Franz Wright
are the only father and son to have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Born in Vienna, Wright
grew up in the Midwest and Northern California. He has taught at Emerson College and the
University of Arkansas. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington,
Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children. At the age of sixteen, he
suffered from his first episode of clinical depression. He was later diagnosed as manic
depressive. For many years, Wright battled alcoholism and drug addiction along with depression.
He is now in recovery, a transition he chronicles in his recent volumes of poetry, which also
explore his Catholic faith. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Beth.