Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley (b. 1951, East St. Louis) is an American poet and educator.

His most recent book is Beautiful Country(Penguin, 2010). Other collections include Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin Group, 2006)Lives of the Animals (2003); Reign of Snakes (1999); In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995); What My Father Believed (1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (1979).

He has published poems in a number of journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker. In 2003 and 2006 he had poems published in Best American Poetry. He is also the recipient of six Pushcart prizes. Reign of Snakes won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Lives of the Animals won the 2005 Poets' Prize. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award.

From 1987 to 1988 he served as writer-in-residence for the state of Idaho, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho State Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Montana in 1976, where he studied with poets Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and John Haines.

He is currently teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Idaho, where his wife, the memoirist and novelist Kim Barnes, also teaches.