Adrienne Rich

American writer known for intensely personal, political poetry which reflects the feminist revolution. She won the National Book Award. Raised in an affluent, literary family, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe. In 1951 she was first published with A Change of World. Rich taught as a Columbia professor 1967-1969 and professor of English at Rutgers after 1976. She was a translator of Dutch, Yiddish and Russian poems.

Rich married on 26 June 1953, had three sons and was widowed on 20 October 1970. In 1976, Rich began her partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, which lasted until Rich's death. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."

In 1997 Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts to protest House Speaker Newt Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Adrienne Rich died on 27 March 2012 at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California home, from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. She was survived by her sons, two grandchildren and her partner Michelle Cliff.