On the Same Page with C.D. Wright

Poet C.D. Wright, a native of Mountain Home, discusses her latest book, “One With Others: [a little book of her days],” . “One with Others” is a mix of poetry and prose in which Wright examines a racist event. The work began as an homage to an anonymous self-taught, literary friend who lived in the Arkansas Delta in the 1960s. Wright was a teenager when she first met the woman and continued to have a relationship with her until she died a few years ago in New York City. The book was nominated for the 2010 National Book Award.

Wright, the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University and a former poet laureate of Rhode Island, has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including the recent volumes “One Big Self: An Investigation” and “Rising Falling Hovering,” which received the Griffin Poetry Award.

Wright also discusses her work organizing and curating the 1994 “Lost Roads Project: A Walk-in Book of Arkansas,” a multimedia exhibit including letterpress broadsides by Arkansas authors and photographs by Deborah Luster (also a native Arkansan), that traveled the state for two years. The project was awarded funding by the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Foundation and was published in book form, with Wright’s accompanying text, by the University of Arkansas Press. Accompanying it was “The Reader’s Map of Arkansas,” a poster documenting the state’s writers from the Hernando de Soto narratives to post-World War II poets.