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In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. In 2006, Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence Blood, Bread, and Poetry an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

Her constellation of honors includes a National Book Award for poetry for Tonight, No Poetry Will Serve, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994, and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals.

A wild patience has taken me this far