User:Katharinecoles/Katharine Coles

Katharine Coles is a Utah-based poet and current Poet Laureate of Utah. Her poems, which focus on science, art, history, nature, perception, and love, have been described as providing a “dazzling profusion of sensory delights” (Melanie Rae Thon, 2008) and as being characterized by “stirring passion and impeccable clarity” (Linda Gregerson, 2008). She has published four collections of poems, Fault (Red Hen Press, 2008), The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension (University of Nevada Press, 2001), A History of the Garden (University of Nevada, 1997) and The One Right Touch (Ahsahta Press, 1992); and two novels, Fire Season (Juniper Press, 2005) and The Measurable World (University of Nevada Press, 1995). Individual poems and stories have been published in over sixty journals and magazines, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Gettysburg Review, DIAGRAM, and North American Review. An ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O’Hara Ure has resulted in several joint installations and an artist’s book, Swoon. Her commissioned works include Passages, a sequence of poems permanently installed in Salt Lake City at the Gateway’s Passages Park, for which Coles also served on the design team; and “The Numbers,” permanently installed as part of Anna Campbell Bliss’s Numbers and Measure in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building at the University of Utah. She is a professor in the English Department at the University of Utah, where she teaches creative writing and literature and co-directs, with biologist and mathematician Fred Adler, the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, which she founded. During 2009-2010, she served a two-year appointment as the Inaugural Director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. During her tenure, the HMPI produced a report on Poetry and New Media: A User's Guide meant to help poets navigate the new media landscape; Blueprints, which includes an anthology of essays by poets who have worked to bring poetry into their communities and a guide for people interested in doing similar work in their own communities; and, with the Center for Social Media, a guide to Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. Her grants include a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Writers Grant (1990), an NEA New Forms Project Grant (1991-1992), and a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant (2009), for which she traveled to Antarctica in 2010.