Meet The Authors
Kim Barnes
Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two novels, most recently A Country Called Home, which received the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction and was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian (Northwest). She is the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction, and her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including the New York Times, MORE, O Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Her forthcoming novel, American Mecca, an exploration of Americans living in 1960s Saudi Arabia, will be published by Knopf in 2011. Barnes teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.
John Clayton
info@johnclaytonbooks.com
http://www.johnclaytonbooks.com/
John Clayton's book, The Cowboy Girl, is a biography of the Montana/Wyoming novelist, journalist, and homesteader Caroline Lockhart. "Expertly researched and wonderfully written," writes Mark Spragg, author of Where Rivers Change Direction, "this biography of Lockhart expands the genre to a meditation on frontier, feminism, and the vagaries of literary hubris. Clayton has rendered a riveting portrait of a woman both troubled and brave, a character caught up in the fiction of her own life." The book relies on archival materials not available to Lockhart's previous biographers.
Clayton lives in Red Lodge, Montana, with his family. His articles appear regularly in the Montana Quarterly, Horizon Air, and dozens of regional newspapers through the Writers on the Range syndicate. And in the business world, he ghost writes white papers, case studies, newsletter articles, and online help files for several leading information and high-tech companies. John especially enjoys bringing his fascination with narrative structure to the communication needs of business executives.
Previously, John wrote the lifestyle advice book Small Town Bound (Career Press, 1990) and has contributed to several other books. He has taught at Rocky Mountain College and is on the advisory board for the Montana Center for the Book. In 2008, Red Lodge (Images of America), (Arcadia Press) was published. He moved from Massachusetts to Montana in 1990.
John appears at Casper College a few days prior to the book festival on Monday, Sept. 20th courtesy of the Gender Studies program and a Humanties Council grant. In his presentation, "Happily Ever Aftering on a 1920s Cattle Ranch", John will discuss the story of Caroline Lockhart. A bestselling Wyoming novelist of the times, Carolyn decided to retire to her very own homestead, setting in motion a conflict: The happy endings of her romantic fictions and the realities of a single woman running a drought-ridden ranch.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert
jcolbert@binghamton.edu
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of a new novel, Shark Girls, nominated for the ALA Notable Books of 2010 List and a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards; a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of Butterflies, which won the gold medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards; a novel in stories, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and the story collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, including TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, Connecticut Review and New Letters, broadcast on “Selected Shorts,” archived in “New Letters on the Air,” and anthologized. Two recent stories won the Jane’s Stories National Short Story Award, 2008, and the Isotope Editors’ Fiction Prize, 2009. Originally from Hawai’i, she is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY, Binghamton University.
Gene Gagliano
www.gargene.com
Known by many children as the teacher who dances on his desk, Gene Gagliano is a retired elementary teacher whose author presentations are entertaining, informative and inspirational. He has presented at schools (78 in Wyoming), and at IRA, teacher, SCBWI, and library conferences, and for other community groups in Wyoming, Colorado, Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana. Gene was the recipient of the International Reading Association’s 2004 Wyoming State Celebrate Literacy Award. In 2001 he received the Arch Coal Teacher Achievement Award. He is a member of the Wyoming Writers, Wyoming Poets, SCBWI, Western Writers, and International Reading Association.
Gene's newest books include Little Wyoming (a board book), V is for Venus Flytrap, a Plant Alphabet and My Teacher Dances on the Desk (children’s poetry). His other published books include: C is for Cowboy, a Wyoming Alphabet; Four Wheels West, a Wyoming Number Book (a former Western Writer’s Spur Award nominee); Inside the Clown; Falling Stars; Prairie Parcels (adult poetry about Wyoming); and Secret of the Black Widow (a former Wyoming Indian Paintbrush Award nominee). Gene has a short story in Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul, Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares, and Celebrate the Season to be released in August. Dee the Mammoth written by Gene and Zachary Pullen, and illustrated by Zachary Pullen will be released in winter 2010. My Teacher Dances on the Desk recently made the 2010 Delaware Diamonds Book List (category grades 3-5), a children’s choice award.
Jack Gantos
childrens.marketing@fsgbooks.com
Jack Gantos is the author of dozens of books for children, including the "Rotten Ralph" readers, the "Joey Pizga" books and the "Jack Henry" books, and books for young adults, including Hole in My Life, (Farrar Straus, 2002), a memoir of crime, prison, and his emergence as a writer. For more on his books, see www.jackgantos.com.
Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. He remembers playing a lot of "pass the chalk" in Mrs. Neiderheizer's class in first grade. He was in the Bluebird reading group, which he later found out was for the slow readers. To this day he'd rather be called a Bluebird than a slow reader. His favorite game at that time was playing his clothes were on fire and rolling down a hill to save himself.
When he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing. Students were friendly but fiercely competitive, and the teachers made learning a lot of fun. By fifth grade he had managed to learn 90 percent of what he knows to this very day. When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. His greatest wish in life is to replace trailer parks with bookmobile parks, which he thinks will eliminate most of the targets for tornadoes and educate an entire generation of great kids who now go to schools that are underfunded and substandard.
The seeds for Jack's writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister's diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers' lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories. In junior high he went to a school that had been converted from a former state prison. He thinks the inmates probably fled for their lives once the students showed up. Again, he spent most of his time reading on his own.
In high school he decided to become a writer. But he would have to wait another three years, until he went to college, before he could actually meet other writers and study with teachers who thought writing amounted to more than just cribbing book reports and composing sympathy notes.
While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Jack's career as a professional writer. This surprised a great many people who thought he was going to specialize in rehabilitating old bookmobiles into housing for retired librarians.
Jack continued to write children's books and began to teach courses in children's book writing and children's literature. He developed the master's degree program in children's book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children's book writers. He now devotes his time to writing books and educational speaking. Jack just completed his latest novel, My Summer Of Writing Obituaries , due out in the fall of 2011, and is presently working on a non-fiction book on how to write children's books.
His publications can take a reader from "cradle to grave" -- from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults. Mr. Gantos is known nationally for his educational creative writing and literature presentations to students and teachers. He is a frequent conference speaker, university lecturer, and in-service provider.
Gantos will be presenting to school district children on Friday, Sept. 24th. He will also be presenting at Casper College on Saturday and will be giving the keynote at the banquet that evening. A local bookstore will be on hand to sell his books and Gantos will be available to sign them following his Saturday presentations.
Lee Gutkind
Lee.Gutkind@asu.edu
Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of the popular journal, Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary journal to publish nonfiction exclusively. He is editor of Best Creative Nonfiction, an annual anthology, and author of Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know about Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, both published by W.W. Norton. In all, Gutkind has written 15 books, and edited 18 collections and volumes in the past 25 years.
His newest book is Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, SUNY Press. Now in paperback from Bison Books is Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather, a memoir. His 2007 book Almost Human: Making Robots Think was published in 2007 by W.W. Norton and release in paperback last fall. During a Daily Show interview with Lee, Jon Stewart called Almost Human “a wild book - a crazy suspense story -- fascinating stuff!”
Lee Gutkind is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.
Russell Hawley
rhawley@caspercollege.edu
Russell J. Hawley attended the University of Colorado in 1985 with the intention of becoming a professional palæontologist. Accordingly, he took classes in geology, biology, zoology, comparative anatomy and human anatomy and physiology. But then he took calculus - and failed it. He took calculus again, and failed it again. After failing calculus for the third time, he decided that he would probably make a pretty mediocre scientist even if, by some miracle, he did ever manage to pass calculus so he switched his major to fine art. He doesn’t regret the science classes that he took at UC - nowadays, if Dr. Sundell tells him something like ‘Remember that the fossa antorbitalis is displaced anteriorly’ Russell doesn’t have to ask for a translation.
Russell’s artwork has appeared in the America's Smithsonian Anniversary traveling exhibition, games, t-shirts and coffee mugs, Prehistoric Times magazine, Mike Everhart’s Oceans of Kansas and Dr. Dale Russell’s Islands in the Cosmos. He also drew quarry maps for Dr. Robert Bakker in the early 90’s. In 1996 he worked for Raptors to Rex: The Dinosaur Predators, a travelling dinosaur exhibit. After his exile to Wyoming in 1997, he began volunteering at the Tate Geological Museum at Casper College. After several months the director of the museum realized that Russell wasn’t going to go away and started paying him a salary. His current duties include giving tours, writing articles for the museum newsletter, and producing illustrations for the museum displays. He also wrote and illustrated Fossil Critters of Wyoming.
Jeff Lockwood
Jeff Lockwood earned a B.S. in biology from New Mexico Tech and a Ph.D. in entomology from Louisiana State University. Originally hired as an Assistant Professor of Entomology at the University of Wyoming, he metamorphosed into a Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities and transferred to the department of philosophy and in the MFA program in creative writing. He teaches nature and spiritual/religious writing, environmental ethics, and philosophy of ecology. His writings have been honored with a Pushcart Prize and a John Burroughs Award. Jeff had an essay selected for and included in Best American Science and Nature Writing.
Jeff has authored the following books: Grasshopper Dreaming: Reflections on killing and loving (2002); Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier (2004); Prairie Soul: Finding grace in the earth beneath my feet (2004); A Guest of the World: Meditations (2006); and Six-legged soldiers: Using insects as weapons of war (2008). In addition, Jeff co-authored with Bill Reiners, Philosophical Foundations for the Practices of Ecology (2010).
Jeff's current project is a work of fiction in the crime noir tradition, set in the 1970's in San Francisco. The protagonist is an ex-cop who's taken over his father's extermination business-where it transpires that controlling pests includes the two-legged version. The work taps into his life-long love of the noir genre and his knowledge of insects and insecticides.
Nina McConigley
Nina Swamidoss McConigley was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, "Owen Wister Considered" was one of five plays produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has been awarded scholarships to both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2008.
She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for "The Best New American Voices 2009". Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Asian American Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio. She is the 2010 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award. She currently teaches at the University of Wyoming and has just completed a story collection, Cowboys and East Indians.
Zak Pullen
Zak@zacharypullen.com
Zachary Pullen’s character oriented illustrations have been seen in numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal to name a few. Zak has been honored several times with acceptance into the prestigious Society of Illustrators juried shows and Communication Arts Illustration Annual of the best in current illustration. Clients include: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire Magazine, Penthouse, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids, The Weekly Standard, The Progressive, Harvard Business Review, Delta Airlines, The National Geographic Society, Simon and Schuster, Chronicle Books, Penguin Putnam, Sleeping Bear Press, Henry Holt, and Scholastic.
Zak has illustrated the following books: The Toughest Cowboy: or How the Wild West Was Tamed (2004), The Greatest Game Ever Played (2006); Casey and Derek on the Ice (2008); The Man Behind the Peace Prize: Alfred Nobel (2009); S is for Story: A Writer's Alphabet (2009); and Finn McCool and the Great Fish (2009). Zak both illustrated and authored Friday My Radio Flyer Flew (2008). Two more books are due out this fall/winter: Hockey Hero and Dee the Mammoth.
Zak currently resides in Wyoming with his wife and son. To see more of Zak’s work, please visit www.zacharypullen.com.
Tom Rea
trea@tribcsp.com
Tom Rea grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., and has lived in Wyoming for 35 years. His books include Devil's Gate: Owning the Land Owning the Story (Oklahoma, 2006), winner of the 2006-07 nonfiction book award from the Wyoming State Historical Society, and Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur, (Pittsburgh, 2001, paperback 2004) winner of a Western Writers of America Spur Award for contemporary nonfiction. He is currently president of the Wyoming Humanities Council, and lives with his family in Casper.
David Romtvedt
romtvedt@uwyo.edu
http://davidromtvedt.com/romtvedt_max_info/index.html
Romtvedt’s books of poetry include Certainty, How Many Horses, Some Church and A Flower Whose Name I do Not Know which won the National Poetry Series award. His work has been selected for the Pushcart Prize and for two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, one in poetry and the other an international fellowship in poetry and music. He is a recipient of a Wyoming Arts Council literature fellowship and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award. Romtvedt serves as faculty member in the MFA program for writers at University of Wyoming. He lives in Buffalo, Wyoming, with his wife, the potter Margo Brown. He is a founder and current board member of Worlds of Music, a foundation devoted to giving people the opportunity to participate in the making of music that come from cultures around the world. His books are for sale at the college bookstore.
Virginia Shank
Virginia Shank lives in Binghamton, NY, works toward a PhD, edits Harpur Palate and Binghamton Writes, dabbles in claymation, and works as a seasonal zookeeper. She earned her MFA and worked on Fugue at the University of Idaho. Her poetry recently appeared in Rhino and The Meadowland Review.
Ravi Shankar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Shankar_(poet)
Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of Drunken Boat, the international online journal of the arts, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary in existence. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove). Ravi was named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, collaborated on a chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book. Ravi reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.) , which was called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.
Ravi is a recipient of a Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism (CCT) FY09 fellowship in Poetry. He also was a winner of a Puschart Prize in poetry, and has received fellowships from Breadloaf, the MacDowell Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center. He has served as a commentator on National Public Radio as well as the BBC. He has two chapbooks of poetry coming out in 2010, including a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt: Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi) and Voluptuous Bristle (Finishing Line).
Ravi's recent book of poems, Deepening Groove, won the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize and will be published in 2011. He is currently on the faculty of Eastern Mediterranean University, the Stonecoast Writers Conference and the first international MFA program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong. He has performed his work around the world, including the Asia Society, PEN India, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. His daughters do not include Norah Jones.
Paul Taylor
For Booking: Loyd Artists, info@loydartists.com To reach Paul Taylor: pauldidj@gmail.com
Paul Taylor celebrates his Australian homeland, sharing stories and music of Aboriginal and European Australia in one-man theater productions. Take a trip down under with Paul in “Matilda and the Dreamtime,” a family and educational performance, or “Land of the Lightning Brothers”, a multi-media performance of Aboriginal stories and music, including the exotic sounds of the didjeridoo. Yidunduma Bill Harney, the last male custodian of the Wardaman culture in Australia’s Northern Territory, mentors Taylor. Taylor returns to Australia on sabbatical each year to study with Mr. Harney and presents the stories and images from this performance with permission of the Wardaman Elder.
As a performing artist, Paul trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, UK. He worked professionally as an actor, stage manager in Australia’s regional theatres, and a clown in a circus show performing throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The state Arts Councils of Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota endorse Taylor’s work. His performance credits include the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Kerrville Folk Festival, Clearwater Revival Folk Festival, National Geographic, Festivale Internationale de Louisiane, National Storytelling Festival and Wyoming Symphony Orchestra.
Now based in Laramie, Wyoming, Paul Taylor has performed and taught for over 300,000 American children. He has been honored for his work with Arts in Education by being appointed Adjunct Professor in the University of Wyoming, College of Education. Paul’s family CD, “Cooee,” won six national awards including Parent’s Choice Gold and the Storytelling World Award.
Ray Troll
ray@trollart.com
From his tree lined studio, high on a hill above the Tongass Narrows in rain-swept Ketchikan Alaska, Ray Troll draws & paints fishy images that migrate into museums, books and magazines and onto t-shirts sold around the planet. Basing his quirky, aquatic images on the latest scientific discoveries, Ray brings a street-smart sensibility to the worlds of ichthyology & paleontology.
Ray moved to Alaska in 1983 to spend a summer helping his big sister Kate start a seafood retail store. The fish store is long gone but Ray is not. There's something about Alaska that has led four of the Troll siblings to call the state ‘home’.
Ray earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas in 1977 and an MFA in studio arts from Washington State University in 1981. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Alaska Southeast. In 2007 he was given a gold medal for ‘distinction in the natural history arts’ by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and in 2006 was given the Alaska Governor’s award for the arts.
Troll's unique blend of art and science culminated in his traveling exhibit, "Dancing to the Fossil Record," a major show that opened at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in 1995. The huge exhibit included Ray's original drawings, gigantic fossils, fish tanks, murals, an original soundtrack, a dance floor an interactive computer installation and the infamous “Evolvo” art car. In 1997 the exhibit traveled to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport and in 1998 it hit the streets of Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The tour ended in 1999 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. By that time it had grown to 14,000 square feet.
Ray followed that tour a few years later with Sharkabet, a Sea of Sharks from A to Z. Venues included the Science Museum of Minnesota , the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Alaska State Museum and the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.
Ray went on to act as the art director for the Miami Museum of Science’s Amazon Voyage traveling exhibit and now has yet another touring show based on his book Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway with Dr. Kirk Johnson.
He and his wife Michelle run the Soho Coho gallery in Ketchikan appropriately situated in an old historic house of ill repute located on a salmon spawning stream. Ray believes that everyone should be in a band regardless of talent or ambition. Holding true to that ethic he helps lead a band of musical renegades called the Ratfish Wranglers.
He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, lectured at Cornell, Harvard and Yale, shown work at the Smithsonian and has even had a ratfish named after him ( a New Zealand species called Hydrolagus trolli ). Not too bad for a t-shirt wearing kinda’ guy.
John Vernon
fac026@binghamton.edu
John Vernon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now lives in Colorado. He was educated at Boston College and the University of California at Davis, and has taught at the University of Utah and Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.) He is the author of eleven books, including the book of poems Ann, the memoir A Book of Reasons, and the novels La Salle, Lindbergh's Son, Peter Doyle, All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar, The Last Canyon, and Lucky Billy. His work has appeared in Harper's, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other magazines, journals, and newspapers. Two of his books have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants. John Vernon is the 21st faculty member at Binghamton University to be named a Distinguished Professor; he now teaches there in upstate New York for the Spring semester each year. For the rest of the year he lives in the mountains of northern Colorado and combines a routine of writing and mountain climbing. In Colorado, he is also affiliated with the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
_thumb.jpg)
George Vlastos
George_Vlastos@ncsd.k12.wy.us
George has been a poetry-pusher for nearly two decades, finding the 'spoken word' to be as vital to his daily living as meals, mountainsides, making-up to his wife, and moderating the emotional moguls of their boys. His emcee credentials stretch as far as the island of Crete where he helped highland shepherds learn then perform in an impromptu gangsta-rap competition (the winner was chosen according to who aroused the most sheep bleatings) to inciting a packed room of Cheyenne's so-called troubled youth to calmly chant the entirety of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road". George will emcee the poetry slam at the Metro Coffee Company, 241 South David in downtown Casper, after 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24.
Larry Watson
readermail@larry-watson.com
Larry Watson received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota, and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah.
He is the author of In A Dark Time, Montana 1948, Justice, White Crosses, Laura, Orchard, Sundown, Yellow Moon, and American Boy (forthcoming 2011), and the chapbook of poetry Leaving Dakota. Watson’s fiction has been published in more than a dozen foreign editions, and has received prizes and awards from Milkweed Press, Friends of American Writers, Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association, New York Public Library, Wisconsin Library Association, and Critics’ Choice. Montana 1948 was nominated for the first IMPAC Dublin international literary prize. Four of his books have been optioned for film.
His short stories and poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North American Review, Mississippi Review, and other literary magazines. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and other periodicals and anthologies. Watson has received two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin/Stevens Point for many years and is presently a Visiting Professor of English at Marquette University. He has also taught in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College and he was the Ebey Visiting Writer at Colorado College.
He and his wife Susan live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They have two daughters and two grandchildren.
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. Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where 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.
His books of poetry include The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon , 1979); Moon In a Mason Jar (University of Illinois, 1986); What My Father Believed (Illinois, 1991); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995); and Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999). His most recent book is Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Among his awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, and the Frederick Bock Prize, from Poetry magazine; the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America; and six Pushcart Prizes. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award for 1996. Reign of Snakes was awarded the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry. Lives of the Animals won The Poets’ Prize for 2005.
He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, near Moscow, Idaho.
Events
9/24/2010
9:00 am to 9:45 am
David Romtvedt Craft Talk: “What Do You Make?: The Ethics of a Writer’s Work”
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
WAC Fellowship Winners
9/25/2010
10:00 am to 11:30 am
Historical Research Panel: “Finding the ‘Story’ in History”
8:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Jaimee Wriston Colbert: “Stories that Bite Back: A Reading from Shark Girls”
Mailing List
