Katharine Coles is an American poet and educator. She served from 2006 to 2012 as Utah's third

poet laureate A poet laureate (plural: poets laureate) is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, typically expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. Albertino Mussato of Padua and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ...

and currently serves as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and the co-director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

Biography

Coles earned her Bachelor of Arts from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

. She later earned a master's degree from the

University of Houston The University of Houston (UH) is a Public university, public research university in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1927, UH is a member of the University of Houston System and the List of universities in Texas by enrollment, university in Texas ...

and her Ph.D. from the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

. In 1997 she joined the faculty at the

. Her published works include the novels ''Fire Season'' and ''The Measurable World'', and five collections of poems: ''Fault'', ''The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension'', ''A History of the Garden'', ''The One Right Touch'', and ''Flight''. She has also contributed stories, poems, and essays to ''

The Paris Review ''The Paris Review'' is a quarterly English-language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. In its first five years, ''The Paris Review'' published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip ...

'', ''

The New Republic ''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...

'', ''

The Kenyon Review ''The Kenyon Review'' is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. ''The Review'' was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. ' ...

'', ''

Image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

'', ''Upstreet'', and ''

Poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

''.

Awards and honors

Coles received the PEN New Writer’s Award in 1992. Her 2001 poetry collection, ''The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension'', received the Utah Book Award. In 2012, she was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

Selected works

Biography/Memoir

*''Look Both Ways'', 2018

Novels

*''The Measurable World'', 1995 *''Fire Season'', 2005

Poetry

*''The One Right Touch'', 1992 *''The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension'', 2001 *''Fault'', 2008 *''The Earth Is Not Flat'', 2013 *''Flight'', 2016 *''Wayward'', 2019 *''Sestina in Prose''

References

External links

"Poetry Foundation Bio"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Coles, Katharine 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists 20th-century American poets 21st-century American poets University of Washington alumni University of Utah faculty Living people Poets from Utah Poets Laureate of Utah Novelists from Utah Year of birth missing (living people)