Idaho writing couple Kim Barnes and Robert Wrigley are two of the presenters who will be featured at the Equality State Book Festival Sept. 24-25 at Casper College.Here's info from the bookfest web site:
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.
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 t
he 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.
