Meet The Authors

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.