Welcome to the Wyoming Authors Wiki

Robert Roripaugh

Roripaugh, Robert

1930 -

Laramie, WY 82070

Email address

Website

Biographical and Professional Information

Robert Roripaugh was appointed by Gov. Jim Geringer to serve as Wyoming's Poet Laureate from 1995 through 2002. A writer of fiction as well as poetry, he ranched with his parents along the Wind River Mountains near Lander and completed B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Wyoming in the 1950s. After Army service in Japan and further graduate work, he returned to Laramie where he taught creative writing and western American literature for 35 years. During that time he directed some forty master's degree thesis projects for students in the Department of English or American Studies.

Roripaugh's latest book, The Legend of Billy Jenks, (High Plains Press, 2007) collects for the first time a number of short stories he has written over the past 55 years, with new notes on how each story came to be written, and a forward by John Nesbitt, cowboy novelist and Ph.D. English instructor at Western Wyoming College.

His poetry is collected in Learn to Love the Haze (Spirit Mound Press, 1976 and High Plains Press, 1996) and The Ranch (2001), which was a finalist for a Western Writers of America Spur Award for 2002. A novel set in postwar Japan, A Fever for Living (Morrow, 1961), was published in hardcover and paperback editions in both America and England. Honor Thy Father (Morrow, 1963), a historical novel dealing with a family ranching in Wyoming's Sweetwater River country in the late 1800s, won a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and was recently reprinted in a paperback edition by HarperCollins.

Over Roripaugh’s career his poems and stories and stories appeared widely in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Atlantic Monthly, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, Higher Elevations: Stories from the West, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, Poets West, and Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming.

Robert Roripaugh has given readings, workshops, and talks on Wyoming Literature for colleges, libraries, and organizations around the state and region. He is a member of Wyoming Writers, WYOPoets, Western Writers of America, the Western Literature Association, and the Authors Guild.