Headshot of poet William Trowbridge in front of a bookshelf.

William Trowbridge was born in Chicago and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. He earned a BA and an MA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a PhD from Vanderbilt. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Enter Dark Stranger (1989), O Paradise (1995), Flickers (2000), The Complete Book of Kong (2003), Ship of Fool (2011), Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems (2014), Vanishing Point (2017), Oldguy: Superhero: The Complete Collection (2019), and Call Me Fool (2022). His chapbooks include The Book of Kong (1986), The Four Seasons (2001), and The Packing House Cantata (2006). From 1986–2004, Trowbridge served as editor for the Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.
 
He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Pushcart Prize and has held fellowships at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and the Anderson Center. In 2012, Trowbridge was appointed poet laureate of Missouri. He is a distinguished professor emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska. He lives in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, with his wife.