William Trowbridge was born in Chicago and grew up in Omaha. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and an M. A. in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His poetry publications include five full collections: Ship of Fool (Red Hen Press, 2011), The Complete Book of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003), Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 2000, 1995, 1989), and three chapbooks, The Packing House Cantata (Camber Press, 2006), The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001) and The Book of Kong (Iowa State University Press, l986). His poems have appeared more than 30 anthologies and textbooks, as well as in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, Columbia, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. He has given readings and workshops at schools, colleges, bookstores, and literary conferences throughout the United States. His awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, a Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and The Anderson Center. He is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northwest Missouri State University, where he was an editor of The Laurel Review/GreenTower Press from 1986 to 2004. Now living in Lee’s Summit, MO, he teaches in the University of Nebraska low-residency MFA in writing program. His hobbies include motorcycling on his Triumph Sprint 995 S/T, travel, and trying to keep the damn rabbits away from the hibiscus.

Other poems by William Trowbridge in Verse Daily:
August 30, 2010:   "The Incredible Shrinking Fool" "Mountain lion! thinks Fool, just before he sees..."

Books by William Trowbridge:

Other poems on the web by William Trowbridge:
"Alone No More"
"Clousseau"

William Trowbridge's Website.

About Ship of Fool:

"Already known as one of America’s best and wittiest poets, William Trowbridge has, in Ship of Fool, found the perfect vessel to convey his vision: comic, tender, wry, compassionate, full of insight and rueful understanding of what it means to carry on, cream pies in the face, pants falling down as the Green Weenie rampages through our foolish, beautiful lives."
—Charles Harper Webb

"Anyone who’s delighted in Bill Trowbridge’s Kong or slaughterhouse poems knows he can whip up an extended poetic sequence like nobody’s beeswax . . . and in Ship of Fool he’s done it again, a witty soufflé of Trowbridgian verbiage, with chewy nuggets of gravitas therein, a paean to the lovable bumbling stumbling shlemiel in all of us."
—Albert Goldbarth

"I laughed out loud reading William Trowbridge’s new collection, Ship of Fool. In the delightfully absurd experiences of Fool, an angel with a big heart for humanity, it’s easy to see ourselves—the joys and heartbreaks, successes and failures of our ordinary lives underscored by chance, mishap, all the accidents of history to which we are bound. The past rears up in these poems, often homely and uncomfortable, tempered by Trowbridge’s fine wit and unsentimental tenderness. As with the best humor, mirth and despair are twinned here—the truth of our human condition to which Trowbridge turns again and again with his wise and empathetic vision."
—Natasha Trethewey