Utah's Poet Laureate Katharine Coles to Visit USU

The Department of English Speaker Series at Utah State University opens the academic year with Utah’s Poet Laureate Katharine Coles, who will read from her work Wednesday, Sept. 2. The reading begins at 12:30 p.m. in USU’s Haight Alumni Center (approximately 650 N. 800 East, Logan). The reading is free and all are invited.

 

Coles was named to a five-year term as Poet Laureate of Utah in 2006. Her fourth collection of poems, Fault, was published by Red Hen Press in 2008. Previous books include three poetry collections, The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, A History of the Garden and The One Right Touch, and two novels, Fire Season and The Measurable World.  An ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O’Hara Ure has resulted in several joint installations and an artist’s book Swoon. Her commissioned works include Passages, a sequence of poems permanently installed in Salt Lake City at the Gateway’s Passages Park, for which Coles also served on the design team, and The Numbers, permanently installed as part of Anna Campbell Bliss’s “Numbers and Measure” in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building at the University of Utah. During the summer of 2009 she completed Burnt Letters, a nonfiction book about her grandparents.

 

Coles is a professor in the English Department at the University of Utah where she teaches creative writing and literature and directs the Creative Writing Program. With Fred Adler, she is co-director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, which she founded.

 

The USU Department of English Speakers Series, part of the Caine School of the Arts, was established to promote the value of arts and humanities in American public life. The series features faculty writing and research accomplishments and noted visiting authors and scholars sharing their work.

 

The next event in the series features Shane Graham, associate professor of English at USU. He will discuss his latest book, South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss, at noon Thursday, Sept. 24. The location will be announced at a later date.

 

For information about the Department of English Speaker Series, call 435-797-2734.