James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1927. He was well known for his translations of such Spanish poets as Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo and for his poems about the Midwest. He received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1972 for his Collected Poems. Other books of his published by Wesleyan are Saint Judas, Shall We Gather at the River , and Above the River: The Complete Poems (co published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His first book, The Green Wall was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. James Wright died on March 26, 1980, at the age of 52.