Franz Wright

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Franz Wright (born March 18, 1953) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.

Born in Vienna and educated at Oberlin College (1977), Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004 for his book Walking to Martha's Vineyard (ISBN 0-375-41518-1). He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category.

Critic Denis Johnson has said, of the poems of Franz Wright, "They're like tiny jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts." Boston Review has called Wright's poetry "among the most honest, haunting, and human being written today" [1]. Critic Ernest Hilbert wrote for Random House's magazine Bold Type that "Wright oscillates between direct and evasive dictions, between the barroom floor and the arts club podium, from aphoristic aside to icily poetic abstraction."^[1]

2003's Walking to Martha's Vineyard, in particular, was well-received. According to Publishers Weekly, the collection features "[h]eartfelt but often cryptic poems...fans will find Wright's self-diagnostics moving throughout." The New York Times noted that "Wright promises, and can deliver, great depths of feeling," while observing that "Wright depends very much on our sense of his tone, and on our belief not just that he means what he says but that he has said something new...[on this score] Walking to Martha's Vineyard sometimes succeeds" [2]. Poet Jordan Davis, writing for The Constant Critic, suggested that Wright's collection was so accomplished it would have to be kept "out of the reach of impulse kleptomaniacs." Added Davis, "deader than deadpan, any particular Wright poem may not seem like much, until, that is, you read a few of them. Once the context kicks in, you may find yourself trying to track down every word he’s written" [3].

Some critics were less welcoming. According to New Criterion critic William Logan, with whom Wright would later publicly feud, "[t]his poet is surprisingly vague about the specifics of his torment (most of his poems are shouts and curses in the dark). He was cruelly affected by the divorce of his parents, though perhaps after forty years there should be a statute of limitation... 'The Only Animal,' the most accomplished poem in the book, collapses into the same kitschy sanctimoniousness that puts nodding Jesus dolls on car dashboards."

Wright is currently the Jacob Ziskind Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University. In 1999 he married the translator Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.