Skagit River Poetry Foundation Advisory Board
Advisory Board Members
Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020 and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishers Triangle Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Other poetry collections include Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)—which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Publishers Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award—The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973).
Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun and many other journals and anthologies. She was awarded Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council and received the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, and five Pushcart Prizes.
Her non-fiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse(Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages.
Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Carolyn Forché
She is also the author of a prose book, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), winner of Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as "itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice." She was one of the first poets to receive the Windham Campbell Prize from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and in 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award.
She has translated the poetry of Claribel Alegría, Robert Desnos, Lasse Söderberg, Fernando Valverde and Mahmoud Darwish. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and in 1990, Lannan Foundation. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.
Robert Wrigley
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.”