PhD, Iowa
MA, Portland State
MA, Regent College, UBC
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 College and Portland State University, both located in Portland, Oregon. After teaching high school for a few years, I headed to University of British Columbia and completed an interdisciplinary master’s degree in religion and literature at Regent College. These interests followed me to the University of Iowa, where I finished a Ph.D. in twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis in religious thought and environmental studies.
I am currently working on a book titled Geographies of Reclamation: Writing and Water in the Columbia River Basin that has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Columbia River History, Texas Tech University, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Some of my recent publications appear in journals such as Literature and Theology, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Western American Literature.
I enjoy spending time with my family and being outside. I teach at St. Jerome's University and serve 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
- 2024 Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Waterloo
- 2018 Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance Award for Teaching Excellence. Co-recipient with Norm Klassen
- 2018 Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, University of Waterloo
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2016 Best Interview Award for “We Are Still Near the Beginning: A Conversation with Wendell Berry,” Evangelical Press Association
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2015 Robert Harding Humanities and Social Sciences Award, University of Waterloo
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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