Nebraska Wesleyan University's annual Visiting Writers Series will continue this month with bestselling author Robert Wrigley.

Wrigley will visit campus on Thursday, October 21. 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, most recently, 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. Beautiful Country, his eighth book, made the Poetry Foundation's contemporary bestsellers list at #7 for the week of September 26. He currently teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. 

Wrigley’s reading will begin at 6 p.m. in Callen Conference Center, located on the lower level of the Smith-Curtis Administration Building.

Poet Meg Kearney will conclude the fall Visiting Writers Series on Tuesday, November 9. Kearney’s most recent collection of poems, Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year as well as winner of the PEN New England LL Winship Award. Her first collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. The Secret of Me, her novel in verse for teens, was released in hardcover by Persea Books in 2005; the paperback edition, along with a teacher’s guide, came out in 2007. Meg’s picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012 and will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Her story “Chalk” will also appear in Fresh Flash: Short Short Stories About Youth, forthcoming from Persea Books. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Poetry Daily and Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac,” and has been published in such publications as Poetry, Agni, and Ploughshares.

Kearney is the Director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., as well as Director of Pine Manor’s Solstice Seminars. Her reading and talk at Nebraska Wesleyan will begin at 6 p.m. in Callen Conference Center.

All Visiting Writers Series events are free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Brad Tice at 402.465.2351, btice@nebrwesleyan.edu or James Shea, 402.465.2349, jshea@nebrwesleyan.edu.