WriterRobert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley grew up in Collinsville, a coal-mining town. The first member of his family to graduate from college and the first male in many generations never to work in a coal mine, he attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo and developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. 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, San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award winner and Lenore Marshall Award finalist); Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999, Kingsley Tufts Award winner); Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003, The Poets’ Prize winner);Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); and most recently, Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010).  He is the recipient of two NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim. Wrigley’s poems have twice been anthologized in Best American Poetry and have appeared in dozens of magazines and literary journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poetry. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, where he and his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, teach in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho.