Award-winning poet C.D. Wright dies, 67

NEWYORK (AP) — C.D. Wright, an award-winning poet renowned for her forceful and eclectic style, her fusion of lyricism and reportage, and her passion for writing, has died. She was 67.

Wright died Tuesday at her home in Barrington, according to publisher Copper Canyon Press. Spokeswoman Kelly Forsythe told The Associated Press on Thursday that Wright died "unexpectedly" and the cause had not yet been determined. A former poet laureate of Rhode Island, Wright was a professor of poetry at Brown University at the time of her death.

Carolyn Delores Wright was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the National Book Critics Circle prize for her 2010 collection, "One With Others," a fulllength work of prose and poetry, based on a true story about a group of black men marching from West Memphis, Tennessee, to Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the summer of 1969, a year after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and they were joined by a white woman identified as V. who has become an outcast in her community because of her participation in the march.

"They drove my friend V out of her home," Wright writes. "They drove her out of the town. They drove her out of the state."

In an autobiographical sketch published in 1986, Wright noted that she was an Arkansas native who lived in the Ozarks until age 17. She would later spend time in Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and the Northeast, but the setting of her childhood would long shape her writing, whether the landscape or the segregation of the races.