Radical feminist, lesbian poet and writer, born at Baltimore, Maryland, to a white southern Protestant mother, and a father of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish descent. In 1951, she graduated from Radcliffe College, and in the same year her first volume of poems, A Change of World, was published. Two years later she married the economist Alfred H. Conrd, and Ortodox Jew.

After leaving her husband in 1966, moving to New York and becoming involved with many of the radical political movements of the 1960s, Rich became increasingly involved in feminism. In her Twenty-One Love Poems, published shortly after beginning her relationship with novelist and poet Michelle Cliff, Rich speaks specifically of her own passion for another woman.

In 1974, when given the National Book award, she declined to accept it as an individual but with Alice Walker and Audrey Rich accepted it on behalf of all women. She and Cliff edited the lesbian-feminist journal Sinister Wisdom from 1981 to 1983. She was named a MacArthur fellow in 1994. Rich has won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry twice, in 1992 and 1996.

Works: A change of World (1951) The Diamond Cutters (1955) Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) Necessities of Life (1966) Selected Poems (1967) Leaflets (1969) The Will to Change (1971)

Diving into the Wreck (1973) Poems Selected and New (1975) A Woman Born (1976) Twenty-One Love Poems (1976) On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1976) The Dream of a Common Language (1978) A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) The Fact of a Doorframe (1984)