He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems[1] and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

Wright attended Christ School (North Carolina) in Asheville for his junior and senior years where he helped coach football, served as vice president of his class, and became a member of the honors program.

[5] Fellow Colleagues poets Robert Peters and James L. McMichael and novelist Oakley Hall shared during this time directorship of the university's well-known Master of Fine Arts program.

[7][5] On June 12, 2014, the Library of Congress announced that Wright would serve as Poet Laureate of the United States beginning on September 25, 2014.

[9] Besides the award-winning books Country Music (1982) and Black Zodiac (1997), Wright has published Chickamauga, Buffalo Yoga, Negative Blue, Appalachia, The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Zone Journals and Hard Freight.