The National Book Foundation announced yesterday that they”ve chosen poet Adrienne Rich as recipient of the prestigious Medal for Distinguised Contribution, a National Book Award Medal. Rich is well-known for her fiery, socially conscious poetry. She has published over 20 books of poetry, including The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004, which won the Book Critics Circle award. Rich was born in 1929, and her poetry chronicles the awakening consciousness of the last century. Her list of awards reads like a list of the top awards for poetry. They include the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship; she is also a former Academy Chancellor. In 1997 Adrienne Rich was awarded the Academy”s Wallace Stevens Award for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

The National Book Foundation was established in 1988 to enhance the visibility of The National Book Awards, begun in 1950 — and to move beyond the Awards into the fields of education and literacy, presenting literary programs across the country, Award-winners and Finalists talking about their “writing life.” To date, thanks to the sustained support of the publishing industry and the public and private sectors, the Foundation has sponsored more than one hundred authors in thirty-eight states, in schools, libraries, community centers, museums, settlement houses, and Native American reservations.

Every fall, in conjunction with the conferring of The National Book Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People”s Literature, the Board of Directors of the Foundation also presents a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which comes with $10,000. The recipient is a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.

Former recipients of the Distinguised Contribution medal include Oprah Winfrey, Stephen King, Studs Terkel, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Judy Blume, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Miller, Gwendolyn Brooks and Eudora Welty.

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