Featured Artist Robert Wrigley Robert Wrigley was born in 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He was the first member of his family ever to graduate from college and the first male in many generations-- in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany -- never to work in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After four months of training and duties, he filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection and spent the next five months attached to "Special Training Detachment #2 at Ft Sam Houston, i  n San Antonio, Texas. In November, he was honorably discharged. Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, as well as with Madeline DeFrees and John Haines, and where he developed a profound and abiding love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston He is currently Professor of English at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing. He has also taught at the University of Oregon, where he served as acting director of the MFA program, and twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. He has also taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren College, in North Carolina.  Wrigley has published five books of poetry: The Stinking of Clay
(Copper Canyon Press, 1979); Moon
In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois,
1986); What My Father Believed (University of Illinois, 1991); Reign of Snakes (Penguin
Putnam, 1999). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two
felowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. In the 1987-88, he served as the state of Idaho's writer-in-Residence.
Among his awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, as well as the Frederick Bock Prize, from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two Pushcart Prizes.
In the Bank of Beautiful Sins received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award for the
1996; it was, in addition, one of the five finalists for the Leonore Marshall Award for the Academy of American
Poets. Wrigley is the 1997 recipient of the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest.
In 1996, he w as awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which made his book, Reign of Snakes, possible.
Robert Wrigley's 1999 collection of poems, Reign of Snakes was awarded the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry. He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, at the Omega Bend, near Rattlesnake Point, on the Clearwater River, in Idaho. |
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Selected Poems |
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Robert Wrigley on the Net
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