Carolyne Wright has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and three volumes of poetry translated from Bengali and Spanish. Her previous collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington University Press/Lynx House Books), won the Blue Lynx Prize and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Wright's investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International Quarterly. Wright spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Calcutta and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground, which received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and an NEA Fellowship in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

A graduate of Seattle University's Humanities Honors Program with masters and doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Syracuse University, Wright has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Seattle Arts Commission, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has been a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A visiting professor at colleges, universities and writers' conferences throughout the U.S., Wright has returned to her native Seattle, where she serves on the faculty of the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, and on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).