Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, on February 27, 1951, and grew up in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He received his BA (with honors) in English language and literature at Southern Illinois University in 1974, and his MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, John Haines, and Richard Hugo.

Wrigley’s collections of poetry include The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003); Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and a Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (University of Illinois Press, 1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (University of Illinois Press, 1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979). His work has also been published in numerous anthologies.

Wrigley’s awards and honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and two Pushcart Prizes.

From 1987 until 1988, Wrigley served as Idaho’s writer in residence. He has taught at Lewis & Clark College, the University of Oregon, Warren College, and twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. He is currently the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. Wrigley lives on Moscow Mountain in Idaho, part of the homelands of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Palus (Palouse), and Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alene) tribes since time immemorial.