Adrienne Rich, R. I. P.

Adrienne Rich Is Dead at 82: The poet Adrienne Rich has died, the LA Times reports. At 82 years old, she was among the most influential feminist writers of her generation, the winner of countless major awards, and a woman both important enough to be selected for the National Medal for the Arts in 1997 and radical enough to refuse it on political grounds. Born in Baltimore in 1929, she published her first collection before graduating from Radcliffe and remained a prolific poet and essayist into the final years of her life. Rich died yesterday in her Santa Cruz, CA home of complications from rheumatoid arthritis.