Jay Wright (born 1935) is an African-American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Poets.org — Poetry, Poems, Bios & More — Jay Wright he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim. Wright's work is emblematic of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination."
Wright played professional baseball before studying comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rutgers University. In the 1960s, he befriended fellow African-American author Henry Dumas and later wrote the introduction to Dumas's Play Ebony, Play Ivory: Poetry. Dumas died in 1968 in New York City.
Over the years he has been poet in residence at Yale University as well as historically Black colleges and universities such as Talledega University, Tougaloo University, Texas Southern University, and the University of Dundee.