Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is the author of 20 books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), long-listed for the Griffin Prize, and Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021) and a volume of critical essays, Noise that Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she co-edited the Norton anthology American Hybrid. Her work has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She taught for ten years on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and twelve years in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University. Also a translator of poetry and art criticism from French, she has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation, the 2024 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. She divides her time between France and the US.