Jay Wright (poet)

Jay L. Wright (born May 25, 1934) is an American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination", inasmuch as it incorporates elements of African, European, Native American and Latin American cultures. Following his receiving the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 2005, Wright is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century. Five of Wright's books were included by Harold Bloom in his list of works constituting the Western Canon, and Dante Micheaux has called Wright "unequivocally, the greatest living American poet"."

Life and education

Wright's family origins are emblematic of the multi-cultural nature of his literary work. His mother, Leona Dailey, was born in Virginia and had both African and Native American ancestry, while his father, George Murphy, or Mercer Murphy Wright, as he was also known, claimed African, Cherokee and Irish roots. Murphy held diverse blue-collar jobs, which included working construction, driving a jitney, and working as a handyman. However, Wright grew up in foster care in Albuquerque, and moved to San Pedro, California, in his teens to live with his father.