Award winning poets Peter Cole and Jacqueline Osherow will read from their poems at the Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch on Wednesday January 14th at 7:00.
The recipient of a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Peter Cole has published three books of poetry, Rift (Station Hill); Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow Press); and, most recently, Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). A fourth volume, What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1989, was also recently published by Shearsman Books in the UK. Cole has worked intensively on Hebrew literature, with special emphasis on medieval Hebrew poetry. In 1988 he started the ambitious project of translating into English texts by Shmuel HaNagid, whose lyrical work had always been considered untranslatable. Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, published by Princeton U. Press (1996), received the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Translation. Cole was granted a TLS translation award for Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, also by Princeton U. Press (2001), an equally challenging translation of the philosopher, poet, and mystic, who was a younger
contemporary of Shmuel HaNagid.
Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1998 Modern Language Association Translation Award. J’Accuse received the 2004 PEN-America Award for Poetry in Translation. He was a visiting fellow at Yale University’s Whitney Center for the Humanities in the fall of 2006. Cole is also the founder and co-editor of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of Levant-related literature. Cole was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957. He began studying Hebrew in Jerusalem in 1981 and has since divided his time between Israel and the United States.
Jacqueline Osherow is the author of five books of poetry. Osherow has been awarded the Witter Bynner Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Twentieth Century American Poetry, The Wadsworth Anthology of Poety and The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Poetry, Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998), The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, The New Yorker, Paris Review and many others. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.
The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, XMission, and audience donations. The featured reading will be followed by an open reading.
