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Adrienne Rich (born May 16 , 1929 in Baltimore , Maryland ) is an American Feminist , Poet , teacher, and writer. LIFE Rich was born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore , Maryland , the elder of two daughters of Arnold Rich, a doctor and Pathology professor at Johns Hopkins University , and Helen Jones Rich, a gifted pianist and composer who had given up a possible professional musical career to raise a family. In 1951 , Rich graduated from Radcliffe College , and also won the prestigious Yale Series Of Younger Poets Competition for her first book, ''A Change of World''. W. H. Auden , the judge of the award, wrote a preface for the book that acquired eventual notoriety for its classic tones of male condescension and paternalism to female artists. In 1953 , Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Cambridge , Massachusetts , where she bore three sons in the next five years. Rich's third book ''Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law'' ( 1963 ), which was eight years in the writing, stands as a watershed in her poetic development. The critical reaction to Snapshots was negative, with objections to its bitter tone and the shift away from her hallmarks of formalism and emotional control. Rich moved to New York in 1966 , when her husband took a teaching position at City College. She taught in the SEEK program, a remedial English program for poor, black, and third world students entering college, which was raising highly political questions about the collision of cultural codes of expression and the relation of language to power, issues that have consistently been addressed in Rich's work. She was also strongly impressed during this time by the work of James Baldwin and Simone De Beauvoir . Though Rich and her husband were both involved in movements for social justice, it was to the women's movement that Rich gave her strongest allegiance. ''Leaflets'' ( 1969 ), ''The Will to Change'' ( 1971 ), and ''Diving into the Wreck'' ( 1973 ), which won the 1974 National Book Award , demonstrated a progressive coming to power as Rich contends against the desolation patriarchy enacts on the literal and psychic landscape. CAREER Over the years, Rich has taught at Swarthmore , Columbia , Brandeis , Rutgers , Cornell , San Jose State and Stanford University . Since 1976 , she has lived with the writer and editor Michelle Cliff. She is active in movements for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and was active in the progressive Jewish movement New Jewish Agenda . In 1981 , she received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force . Her poetry has been honored with two Guggenheim Fellowships , the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize , the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship , the Academy Of American Poets Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation , and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize . Rich refused the that Rich had won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for ''School Among the Ruins''. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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