the U.S. Army medical corps in Germany until 1957; in this period he was able to travel in many countries in Europe. Upon returning from Europe, Wright studied comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University. He received his BA from Berkeley in 1961, and his MA from Rutgers in 1967. In 1964, he taught English and medieval history for a year at the Butler Institute in Guadalajara, Mexico. After this experience, he returned to Rutgers to finish his MA and begin work on a PhD, but left before completing his doctoral degree. As a student at Rutgers, Wright lived in Harlem, where he met African-American writers associated with the Black Arts Movement (BAM), such as Larry Neal, LeRoi Jones, and Henry Dumas. Wright would later write the introduction to Dumas' posthumously published collection of poetry, Play Ebony, Play Ivory: Poetry. Wright has been described as a member of the Black Arts Movement, although in a monograph dedicated to the movement, only Wright's first book, The Homecoming Singer, is discussed in connection with the group. Indeed, Wright's poem "Idiotic and Politic", from The Homecoming Singer, has been read as "a virtual declaration of independence from BAM," addressed directly to LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), the founder of the Black Arts Movement. Over the years Wright has been poet in residence at Yale University as well as the University of Dundee and historically black colleges and universities such as Talladega College, Tougaloo College, and Texas Southern University. Poetry Wright's first publication was a 22-page chapbook entitled Death as History, which contained 15 poems, published in 1967 by Poets Press. Although this collection has never been republished, some of the poems were included in Wright's first full-length book, The Homecoming Singer. Wright himself has disowned the book in print, saying that it was not intended as a unified work, but merely as "a group of poems selected from those [he] had on hand". At the time the book was published, Wright was employed on a tour of black schools in the South for the Woodrow Wilson-National Endowment of the Arts program, and Carolyn Kizer thought he ought to have a book of poems; therefore, she helped him publish the book with Diane DiPrima of Poets Press. In the poems that were not republished in The Homecoming Singer, the language, imagery and sensibility have been described as romantic and conventional