Chad Wriglesworth

Before coming to St. Jerome’s University, I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in 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 literature and theology 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 teach courses in modern and contemporary American literature, as well as courses in genre studies and literary criticism. In Literary Theory and Criticism (ENGL 251), a required course for majors and minors, I help students acquire new knowledge about literary studies as they participate in practical, historical, imaginative, and theoretically informed engagements with literature. In American Literature Since 1945 (ENGL 347), students explore how contemporary styles of writing are used to remember people and places, events like the Vietnam War, the realities of Indigenous colonization, and attempts to recover a revised sense of home. Whether talking about representations of beauty, encounters with violence, or profound experiences of the ordinary, I am attracted to teaching texts that expand our understanding of what it means to be human in a vast and awe-inspiring universe.

In fall of 2025, I’ll be teaching a new “SJU Start Seminar” for first year students on the theme of “Reflection and Action” (HUMSC 101). This course will help students reflect and act upon what it means to be a co-registered student at St. Jerome’s University, a place with a tradition and mission that is committed to educating the whole person in a specific place. By the end of the course, students will be more fully integrated into the life of St. Jerome’s as well as the larger community they are living within.

The course will focus on the meaning and complexity of “place.” With that in mind, during our time together we will consider ways that people live their embodied, everyday lives in specific locations, as well as the ways in which people and organizations have attempted to reflect and act upon issues of human, economic, and environmental justice, particularly in situations where people and ecological systems are damaged or marginalized. This will happen in collaborative and conversational ways, as we read and discuss fiction, essays, and poetry; listen to podcasts and interviews; watch and discuss films; and engage with local community members—within and beyond SJU—who are committed to the people and places that they interact with on a daily basis.

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 is a fifteen-year correspondence between 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: Writing, 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.

**Considering studying English at St. Jerome’s University? Listen to Chad Wriglesworth discuss how art and literature impact how we view the world in his "Two Minute Lecture".**

The content that follows may only represent a portion of the Faculty member’s work.

Books

Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Edited and Introduction. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2014.

Chapters

“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.

“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.

“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 Publishing, 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., Thomas Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 86-99.

“Raymond Carver and Alcoholics Anonymous: A Narrative under the ‘Surface of Things.’” In New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry.  Eds. Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 132-154.

Articles

“‘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.

“Stepping onto the Yakama Reservation:  Land and Water Rights in Raymond Carver’s ‘Sixty Acres.’”  Western American Literature 45.1 (Spring 2010): 55-79.

“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 (Winter 2010-11): 30-35.“‘What the River Says,’ Reading William Stafford’s The Methow River Poems as New Genre Public Art.”  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.2 (Spring 2010): 1-23.

“Theological Humanism as Living Praxis: Reading Surfaces and Depth in Margaret Edson’s Wit.” Literature and Theology 22.2 (June 2008): 210-222.    

Others

Podcasts

Amy Anderson and Chad Wriglesworth, "On Poetry and Faith in a Postmodern World," Regent College Podcast, 2017.

Paul Swanson and Chad Wriglesworth, "Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder are Distant Neighbors," Contemplify Podcast, 2018.

ENGL 100C: Drama

ENGL 201: The Short Story

ENGL 248: Literature for an Ailing Planet

ENGL 251: Literary Theory and Criticism

ENGL 324: Modern and Contemporary American Drama

ENGL 332: Topics in Creative Writing

ENGL 344: Modern American Literature

ENGL 347: American Literature Since 1945

ENGL 348: American Poetry Since 1850

ENGL 432: Topics in Creative Writing [Topic: Writers on Creative Writing]

ENGL 486: Topics in Literatures Modern to Contemporary [Topic: Forms of Belief in Contemporary American Poetry]

ENGL 486: Topics in Literature Modern to Contemporary [Topic: Minds at Work: Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy]

ENGL 760: Studies in 20th-Centurey American Literature [Topic: Robinson and McCarthy]

ENGL 785: Environmental Criticism

RS 291: Special Topics [Topic:The Sacramental Imagination, co-taught with Dr. Norm Klassen]

CT 613: The Catholic Imagination in Art and Literature

Modern and Contemporary American Literature

Literature and Theology

Environmental Humanities

American Poetry and Poetics

Native American Literature

Literature and the American West

Grants

St. Jerome’s University, Faculty Research Grant (2017-2018)

University of Waterloo, Robert Harding Humanities and Social Sciences Award (2015-2017)

St. Jerome’s University, Faculty Research Grant (2015-2016)

St. Jerome’s University, Faculty Research Grant (2013-2014)

St. Jerome’s University, Faculty Research Grant (2012-2013)

Fellowships

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, Early Career Fellowship Program, Recent Doctoral Recipient Fellowship (2009-2011)

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, Early Career Fellowship

Program, Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2009-2010)

Center for Columbia River History, James B. Castles Fellowship (2008-2009)

Texas Tech University, Formby Research Fellowship (2008-2009)

University of Iowa Newman Center, Catholic Studies Research Fellowship (2005-2006) 

Awards

University of Waterloo, Distinguished Teacher Award (2025)

University of Waterloo, Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching Award (2024)

Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance Award for Teaching Excellence (2018)

University of Waterloo, Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2018)

Evangelical Press Association, Best Interview Award for “We Are Still Near the Beginning: A Conversation with Wendell Berry” (2016)

University of Waterloo, Federation of Students Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award (2014)

University of Iowa, W.R. Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching (2008)

The content that follows may only represent a portion of the Faculty member’s work.

Professional

Associate Editor, The Raymond Carver Review

Editorial Board, Archivation Exploration, Texas Tech University

Advisory Board, University of Nevada Press, Waterscapes: History, Cultures, and Controversies

Administrative

St. Jerome's University

Chair, Department of English (2018-2021)