Ep. 142: Katharine Coles

Artifice

Katharine Coles was born and raised in Salt Lake City. After four years at school in Seattle and two in Houston, and a year in Washington, D.C. as Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School, she moved back to Salt Lake to pursue her PhD at the University of Utah. She taught for several years at Westminster College, then returned to the University of Utah, where she is now a Distinguished Professor in the English Department. Coles’ ten books include seven collections of poems, most recently Wayward (Red Hen Press, 2019). Her memoir, Look Both Ways, was released in 2018 by Turtle Point Press, which will also publish The Stranger I Become: essays in reckless poetics in 2021. 2018-19 Poet-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Salt Lake City Public Library for the Poets House FIELD WORK program, she also served from 2006-2012 as the third Poet Laureate of Utah, and in 2009-10 as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the international Digging Into Data Challenge, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems and essays have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Dutch.