Artist Detail

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Katharine Coles

Poet

About the artist:

Katharine Coles' books include the novels FIRE SEASON and THE MEASURABLE WORLD and four collections of poems, FAULT, THE GOLDEN YEARS OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION, A HISTORY OF THE GARDEN, and THE ONE RIGHT TOUCH. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in THE PARIS REVIEW, THE NEW REPUBLIC, THE KENYON REVIEW, and POETRY, among many other journals. Her poems have been included in numerous public arts projects, including Salt Lake City's Passages Park, for which she served on the design team; and NUMBERS AND MEASURES (www.asci.org/digital2001/bliss/bliss.htm), an installation by Anna Campbell Bliss in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building at the University of Utah. Her ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O'Hara Ure (www.art.utah.edu/arthome) has resulted in two major installations and an artist's book, SWOON. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN, among many other organizations. She is on the faculty of the English Department at the University of Utah, where she teaches creative writing and literature and, with mathematician and biologist Fred Adler (www.math.utah.edu/~adler), co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature (www.scienceandliterature.org), which she originated in 2001. She has recently finished BURNT LETTERS, a nonfiction book about her grandfather, a petroleum geologist and explorer from 1926 until the early sixties, and her adventurous grandmother. This project has taken her up the Amazon and to Havana, Indonesia, and Singapore; a long chapter, "Venezuela Triangle," was published in spring 2008. In 2006, she was named to a five-year term as Utah's Poet Laureate.