Visiting Hurst Professor Cole Swensen lectures on the craft of poetry

Cole Swensen was born and raised near San Francisco and earned her BA and MA from San Francisco State University and a PhD from the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a former director of the creative program at the University of Denver and taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is currently a professor in the literary arts program at Brown University and founder and editor of La Presse, a small press dedicated to the translation and publication in English of contemporary French poetry.
 
Swensen is the author of thirteen collections of poetry and has translated ten books of poetry into English from French. Her most recent books include Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012), Stele (Post-Apollo Press, 2012), and Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).  Her translation of Lazy Suzie by Suzanne Doppelt (Litmus Press, 2015) was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and her translation of Island of the Dead by Jean Frémon (Green Integer, 2002) won the PEN USA Award for Literary Translation. In 2009, Swensen coedited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. A book of her essays on poetry, Noise That Stays Noise, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011.