Biographical Sketch: 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 ever to graduate from college and the first male--in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wales, and Germany--never to work in a coal mine. In 1971, with a draft lottery number of 66, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. After four months of training and duties, he filed for discharge on the grounds of conscientious objection and spent the next five months attached to "Special Training Detachment #2" at Ft Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. For two weeks in October of that year, he dug a trench eighteen inches wide by twenty-four inches deep by 80 yards long. It took him only four days to fill it back up. In November, he was honorably discharged.

Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, as well as with Madeline DeFrees and John Haines, and where he developed a profound and abiding love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston. He is currently Professor of English at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program. He has also taught at the University of Oregon, where he served as acting director of the MFA program, and twice at the University of Montana, where he returned to hold the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. He has also taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina.

He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, and their children, near Moscow, Idaho.


Kim Barnes

Publications and Awards: Kim Barnes is the author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (Doubleday 1996; Anchor 1997) for which she received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction. In the Wilderness has been honored with a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Hungry for the World, her second memoir, was published by Villard in 2000 and Anchor in 2001, and was a Borders Books New Voices selection. Together, she and Mary Clearman Blew edited Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers (Penguin 1994; University of Oklahoma 2001). Barnes’ personal essay, “The Ashes of August,” appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of The Georgia Review and was selected for inclusion in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her first novel, Finding Caruso, is forthcoming from Marian Wood Books/Putnam in March 2003.


On FINDING CARUSO:

“It’s been a long time in the wasteland, but I finally found a manuscript that knocked me out. “[Barnes] is the real thing—a writer of extraordinary style and deftness.”
Editor Marian Wood
Publisher’s Weekly

“…[A] stunningly dramatic and tensely erotic novel of sexual and moral awakening, and sheer survival…. A powerful coming-of-age tale blazingly frank in its depiction of family betrayals, racial hatred, and thwarted love.”
Booklist


Biographical Sketch: Kim Barnes was born in Lewiston, Idaho, in 1958, and one week later returned with her mother to Orofino Creek, where her father was logging. For the next twelve years, before moving back to Lewiston, her family worked and lived in the small communities and logging camps of north Idaho--Pierce, Headquarters, and a number of places along the North Fork of the Clearwater River. Barnes received her BA in English from Lewis-Clark State College in 1983, her MA in English from Washington State University in 1985, and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 1995.

She now teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, and their children on Moscow Mountain.