Katharine Coles is a poet and prose writer best known for her lyric meditations on science, art, history, and perception.
Coles’ poems have also appeared in a variety of settings and commissions. She has engaged in on ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O’Hara Ure that has produced two installations and an artist’s book, Swoon. The Red Butte Press, which has recently commissioned a book from Coles and Ure, in 2013 produced Problems of Description, an artist’s book illustrated by visual artist and printmaker Mary Toscano and featuring one of Coles’ Antarctica poems. Her poem “Numbers” was commissioned by visual artist Anna Campbell Bliss and appears as part of Bliss’s Numbers and Measures, a permanent installation in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building at the University of Utah; “Four Rooms” was commissioned by the Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles in response to its exhibit, This Is Not a Silent Movie: Four Contemporary Alaska Native Artists. Another series, Passages, appears as a permanent installation in Salt Lake City’s Passages Park, for which Coles served as a member of the design team. And her poems have been set to music by a number of composers.
Her awards for her work include a 2012-13 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, both an Individual Writers Fellowship and a New Forms Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Utah.
(excerpt from U of U Faculty profile)
