Faculty: 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" at Ft Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. For two weeks in October of that year, he dug a trench eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches deep by 80 yards long. It took him only four days to fill it back up. In November, he was honorably discharged.

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, and with Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines. It was in Montana that he developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston, and since 1999, 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 Wilson College, in North Carolina.

He has published eight books of poetry: The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979); Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995); Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999); Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); and most recently, Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 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 six Pushcart Prizes. His poems have twice been selected for reprint in Best American Poetry anthologies. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award for 1996; it was, in addition, one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Reign of Snakes was awarded the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry. Lives of the Animals won The Poets’ Prize for 2005. Wrigley’s poems have appeared in dozens of magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry.

He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, in the woods, near Moscow, Idaho.