In this 1977 letter from our archive, Adrienne Rich writes to Betty Kray, the first executive director of the Academy of American Poets, about her family and various female poets she’d like to see featured in a reading series. Rich addresses the importance of the representation of racially and ethnically diverse voices in poetry and discusses some of the changes she and her family had been undergoing at the time; she herself was at a transformative time in both her personal and professional lives, as she was beginning to publish works that would place her in the spotlight in discussions of female sexuality and sexual identity politics.