PhD, University of Iowa
MA, Portland State University
MA, Regent College, University of British Columbia
BA, Warner Pacific University
Extension: 28283
Email: cwriglesworth@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I grew up on the West Coast of the United States and studied English at Warner Pacific University and Portland State University, both located in Portland, Oregon. I then headed to the University of British Columbia and completed an interdisciplinary master’s degree in theology and literature at Regent College. These interests followed me to the University of Iowa, where I finished a PhD in twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis in religious thought and environmental humanities.
I am currently finishing two research projects. I’m editing a book titled What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison that will be published with University of Michigan Press. This fifteen-year correspondence tracks the lives of two close friends as they emerge from obscurity to become well-known voices in their respective genres. In addition, I’m also completing Geographies of Reclamation: Literature, Art, and Lived Experience in the Columbia River Basin for University of Nevada Press. Using regional archives, environmental history, bioregional theory, and the geography of the watershed itself, this book maps ways that prose, poetry, and visual arts have shaped cultural attitudes, spiritual practices, and environmental policies in the Pacific Northwest for more than 160 years.
I also enjoy working as an Associate Editor for The Raymond Carver Review.
Selected publications
Books
Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Edited and Introduction. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2014.
Articles and Book Chapters
“Re-presenting Life Back to God: Contemporary Poetry and the Complexity of Human Experience.” CRUX: A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion 56.1 (Spring 2020): 12-25.
“Writing on Water: Sherman Alexie’s Poetry on the Reclamation of Spokane Falls.” In The Spokane River. Ed. Paul Lindholdt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. 142-153.
“‘Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all’: On the road to Washington D.C. with Bruce Springsteen.” In Music and the Road: Essays on the Interplay of Music and the Popular Culture of the American Road. Ed. Gordon Slethaug. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017. 157-174.
“‘The Thing I Would Like, Actually, is to Bless You’: Acknowledging the Soul in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” CRUX: A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion 52.3/4 (Fall/Winter 2016): 28-41.
“Salmon Theology and Spokane Falls: Catholicism and Restorative Justice in Sherman Alexie’s Poetry.” In Ecotheology in the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Divine and the Natural World. Ed. Melissa Brotton. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 87-118.
"We Are Still Near the Beginning: A Conversation with Wendell Berry.” CRUX: A Quarterly Journal of Christian Thought and Opinion 51.1 (Spring 2015): 3-15.
“Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” In This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. Ed. Jason W. Stevens. Boston, MA: Brill, 2015. 91-130.
“Raymond Carver and the Shaping Power of the Pacific Northwest.” In Critical Insights: Raymond Carver. Ed. Jim Plath. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013. 19-35.
“The Poetics of Water: Currents of Reclamation in the Columbia River Basin.” In The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty, Thomas Lynch and Karla Armbruster. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press (2012).
"Trampling Kamiakin’s Gardens: The Legacy of Theodore Winthrop’s Stay at St. Joseph’s Mission, 1853." Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History 24.4 (2011): 30-35.
"Stepping onto the Yakama Reservation: Land and Water Rights in Raymond Carver’s ‘Sixty Acres'." Western American Literature 45.1 (2010): 55-79.
"‘What the River Says,’ Reading William Stafford’s The Methow River Poems as New Genre Public Art." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.1 (2010): 1-23.
Fellowships & Awards
-
2025 Distinguished Teacher Award, University of Waterloo
- 2024 Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Waterloo
- 2018 Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance Award for Teaching Excellence
- 2018 Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Waterloo
-
2016 Best Interview Award for “We Are Still Near the Beginning: A Conversation with Wendell Berry,” Evangelical Press Association
-
2015 Robert Harding Humanities and Social Sciences Award, University of Waterloo
-
2014 Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Waterloo
- 2009-11 Early Career Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies
- 2008-09 James B. Castles Fellowship, Center for Columbia River History
- 2008 University of Iowa, W.R. Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching
- 2005-06 Newman Center at University of Iowa, Catholic Studies Fellowship
Areas of graduate supervision
- Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American literature
- Ecocriticism and place studies
- Religion & American Culture
- Native American literature
- Literature and the American West