C. D. Wright was one of the most influential and vital North American poets of her generation. After her sudden, unexpected death in 2016, the New York Times obituary noted that she was so uniquely original that she “constituted a school of exactly one.” Although she was known as a lyric and elliptical poet, she drew from narrative and documentary poetics to write books defined by their wry humor, their ethical orientation, and their inventive formal strategies. She grew up in the Ozarks of Arkansas as the daughter of a country judge and a court reporter. There she picked up a keen vernacular voice that came to characterize much of her writing. Wright was married to the poet Forrest Gander from 1983 until her death; they had one child, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Among many prestigious honors, Wright received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. Since her death, the Foundation of Contemporary Arts has funded an annual C. D. Wright Prize, an annual C. D. Wright Women’s Writers’ Conference was launched, Brown University funded into perpetuity a C. D. Wright Memorial Lecture, and books of critical essays on her work and a “Collected and New Poems” are in the works.