C.D. Wright's poetic roots are deeply planted in the Ozark Mountain region where she was born and raised. Wright began writing poetry on a full-time basis in the early 1970s. After completing her bachelor's degree, she briefly attended law school, but she wanted the freedom to write. She moved to New York City, working in an art auction house. Later, she attended the University of Arkansas to earn a master of fine arts in creative writing. In addition to teaching at Brown, she has worked as coeditor at Lost Roads Publishers, an independent literary press founded by poet Frank Stanford.

Wright earned positive notice for her first full-length collection of poetry, Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues. A number of critics felt that the poems in this volume succeed because of their stark simplicity, which grows out of their Ozark Mountain setting. The poems are concerned with small towns and the quiet loneliness of everyday life. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert B. Shaw called attention to the "trenchant, matter-of-fact manner" and the "casual, relentless clarity" of the poems. Kim Addonizio, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, praised the poems' "perfect clarity and seeming simplicity." Ironwood contributor Frances Mayes characterized the poems as "short, honed lyrics, both severe and musical"—the latter quality reflecting Wright's interest in music, particularly jazz, which finds expression in a group of poems titled "The Secret Life of Musical Instruments."

In 2001 Wright published her tenth volume of poetry, Steal Away: Selected and New Poems. The poems were written over a period of twenty years. Many of the poems contained in this volume have been previously published in other works, but there are also several new, previously unpublished poems. Wright's poetic style continues to be eclectic and experimental, employing multiple levels of diction, including vernacular.

Steal Away garnered positive reviews from many critics who found this book, and Wright's work in general, to be bold and refreshing, a departure from the more mainstream modern poetry found on bookshelves today. "Not only do her poems explore uncharted ground in both subject and form, each new volume seems to take new risks," observed Rochelle Ratner in the Library Journal. Other readers appreciated the author's ability to blend together previous works in order to create a new book with a completely new feel and flavor. Steal Away is a "careful selection from a strong body of work," concluded one Publishers Weekly contributor.

In 2005 Wright published Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. This collection includes speculation, recollection, critical thoughts, and criticism. While the author relates tales from her life and the events that have shaped it, she also writes about her literary contemporaries, including authors W.S. Merwin and Michael Ondaajte. Other passages include a reflection about one of Wright's old teachers and a description of a Southeastern road trip. Critics again praised Wright for her work in Cooling Time. For some, it is the author's reflections about a wide range of people and topics that make her book enjoyable to read. For others, Wright continues to surprise and intrigue her regular readers and new ones alike. "Readers who seek not autobiography but cogent thoughts, ideas, quotable claims about the state of the art ... will find themselves delighted," wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

Reviewers have also observed that Wright's work displays a strong dramatic quality. For instance, in Poetry Lorrie Goldensohn asserted that Wright's poems are "saturated with a human presence." Writing in Field, reviewer David Walker summarized the appeal of Wright's poetry, noting that though her poems are set in the Ozarks, her work is not "of simply regional interest; like [American author William] Faulkner she knows how to reach the universal through the local. She also shares something of [Austrian writer Franz] Kafka's sense of the ominousness of ordinary life, and of [American poet Emily] Dickinson's fascination with the habitual and ostensibly mundane. Yet Wright is never derivative; her voice and vision are genuinely original, vital, and haunting."

Dear Conflicted Reader: A discussion of C.D. Wright's One Big Self