Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Fiddlehead contributor Charles Wright Named US Poet Laureate

Photo credit: Holly Wright, poets.org
Charles Wright, Pulitzer Prize winning US poet and past contributor to The Fiddlehead (nos. 236 and 252), has been named the next US Poet Laureate.

According to the announcement on the Library of Congress website, James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, says, "Charles Wright is a master of the meditative, image-driven lyric. ... For almost 50 years his poems have reckoned with what he calls 'language, landscape, and the idea of God.' Wright’s body of work combines a Southern sensibility with an allusive expansiveness, for moments of singular musicality."

In the summer of 2008, The Fiddlehead published a Charles Wright retrospective along with a selection of new poems. In the summer of 2012, Wright contributed two more new poems to the magazine.