[3] Over the next 30 years, Wright won many major American literary prizes (including fellowships from the Lila Acheson Wallace, Guggenheim, Lannan, and MacArthur Foundations) while publishing one of the most eclectic bodies of poetic work of her generation.

The cyclical erotic and tormented fragments of Just Whistle are as distinct from the compressed, sensual narratives of Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues as from the lyrical southern paeans of Further Adventures with You.

Her diction mixes high and low to surprising effect, and her range of reference is both broad and deep, including phrases from other languages, allusions to other poems, and pieces of conversation.

Her books include precisely distilled lyrics such as those collected in Tremble as well as book-length poems beginning with Just Whistle, her first collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster.

[10] In a 2001 interview with Kent Johnson, Wright said, As to my own aesthetic associations—affiliations, sympathies—I have never belonged to a notable element of writers who identified with one another partly because I come from Arkansas, specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, a non-urban environment where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form.In the same interview, she states, The theoretically-driven San Francisco poets who were in cahoots with poets in New York and conversant with European vanguard movements—they provided me with a need to become critically aware of my back-home ways; sharpened me to a degree.

[12] Wright's later work includes String Light; Deepstep Come Shining, a book-length poem; and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, another collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster.

One With Others mixes investigative journalism, history and poetry to explore homegrown civil rights incidents and the critical role her mentor, a brilliant and difficult woman, played in a little-known 1969 March Against Fear in her native Arkansas.