Toby Wray, Ph.D.

Tobias Wray, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English specializing in creative writing with research interests in experimental poetics, queer and speculative literatures, and literary translation. His collection of poems, No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man, won the CSU Poetry Center’s Lighthouse Poetry Series Competition. Other work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Meridian, Bellingham Review, Hunger Mountain and Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology (Autumn House Press). 

He served as director of undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Idaho until 2021. He was also a poetry editor for Cream City Review and, until 2017, helped to coordinate Eat Local:: Read Local, a program that partners restaurants with regional poets for National Poetry Month. He holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he was a James A. Sappenfield Fellow. He also holds an M.F.A. in poetry and translation from the University of Arkansas’s program in creative writing and translation.  

At UCO, he helps advise the English department’s graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs. He also teaches various courses in the department, including Introduction to Creative Writing, Poetry Writing and Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. He is currently working on a new manuscript of poems and on an essay collection considering the queer sublime. In support of these projects, he received a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellowship, along with the UCO College of Liberal Arts 2022 Award for Outstanding Scholarly and Creative Activity. 

10 a.m.-noon, Monday and Wednesday, and by appointment.