She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",[1][2] and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse".

[4] Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by icon W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

Her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Her paternal grandfather Samuel Rice was an Ashkenazi immigrant from Košice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present day Slovakia), while his mother was a Sephardic Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library, where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen,[10] Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson.

The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions—moving into a world in which excellence was expected.

"[12] After graduating from high school, Rich earned her diploma at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she focused on poetry and learning the writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all.

After visiting Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford, and spent her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

[18] Her collections from this period include Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971), which reflect increasingly radical political content and interest in poetic form.

[17] From 1967 to 1969, Rich lectured at Swarthmore College and taught at Columbia University School of the Arts as an adjunct professor in the Writing Division.

[20][13][17] In 1971, she was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and spent the next year and a half teaching at Brandeis University as the Hurst visiting professor of creative writing.

[14] Diving into the Wreck, a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, split the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America.

Ultimately, they moved to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued her career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist.

[30] Rich published several volumes in the next few years: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989).

[39] In June 1984, Rich presented a speech at the International Conference of Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in Utrecht, Netherlands titled Notes Toward a Politics of Location.

In an attempt to try to find a sense of belonging in the world, Rich asks the audience not to begin with a continent, country, or house, but to start with the geography closest to themselves –which is their body.

[40] Rich, therefore, challenges members of the audience and readers to form their own identity by refusing to be defined by the parameters of government, religion, and home.

[14][22] During the 1990s Rich joined advisory boards such as the Boston Woman's Fund, National Writers Union and Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa.

In 2002, she was appointed a chancellor of the newly augmented board of the Academy of American Poets, along with Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Jay Wright (who declined the honor), Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Rosanna Warren, Charles Wright, Robert Creeley, and Michael Palmer.

[14] She won the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and was applauded by the panel of judges for her "honesty at once ferocious, humane, her deep learning, and her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves.

Diving Into the Wreck was written in the early 'seventies, and the collection marks the start of her darkening tone as she wrote about feminism and other social issues.

Especially, Bread and Poetry contains the famous feminist essay entitled "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", and Feminism and Community.

In Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Rich wrote that "feminism became a political and spiritual base from which I could move to examine rather than try to hide my own racism, recognize that I have anti-racist work to do continuously within myself".

She went on to write that "so long as [feminists] identify only with white women, we are still connected to that system of objectification and callousness and cruelty called racism".

Citing such prominent black feminist activists and academics as Gloria T. Hull, Michele Russel, Lorraine Bethel, and Toni Morrison in her works, Rich dedicated several chapters of her book Blood, Bread, and Poetry to the subject of racism.

Of her essay Of Woman Born, Rich wrote that it "could have been stronger had it drawn on more of the literature by Black women toward which Toni Morrison's Sula inevitably pointed me.

"[62][63] Touching on the privilege conferred to her as a white feminist author, Rich wrote in Blood, Bread, and Poetry that she "is probably going to be taken more seriously in some quarters than the Black woman scholar whose combined experience and research give her far more penetrating knowledge and awareness than mine.

"[64] In 1981, Rich co-presented the keynote address for the National Women's Studies Association Convention in Storrs, Connecticut, along with Audre Lorde, delivering her speech entitled "Disobedience is What NWSA is Potentially About."

Rich went on to say that "women of color who are found in the wrong place as defined at any given time by the white fathers will receive their retribution unseen: if they are beaten, raped, insulted, harassed, mutilated, murdered, these events will go unreported, unpunished, unconnected; and white women are not even supposed to know they occur, let alone identify with the sufferings endured."