Literary Arts

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry, most recently Landscapes on a Train (Nightboat Books, 2017) and Gravesend (U. of California Press, 2012), and a volume of essays, ;Noise That Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). She is the co-editor of the 2009 Norton anthology American Hybrid, the founding editor of La Presse Books, which specializes in contemporary experimental French writing translated by English-language poets. She is also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose, and art criticism. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN USA Award for Literary Translation, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, among others. A finalist twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and once for the National Book Award, she’s been writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Pratt Institute, Temple University, and various other places, and taught at the University of Denver and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop before coming to Brown, where she taught until retiring at the end of the 2023 calendar year.