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 to graduate from college and the first male in many generations--in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany--never to have worked in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After seven months of training and duties, he successfully filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection.

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines. It was in Montana that he developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. He has lived and taught in Idaho since 1977 and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho.

His collections of poetry include The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022;  Box (Penguin, 2017); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award; Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Nemerov's Door, published by Tupelo Press.

Wrigley's honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, and seven Pushcart Prizes. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His poems have been widely anthologized, included five times in Best American Poetry, and featured four times on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer’s Almanac."



(drawing below:: ©Susan Avishai 2019)