Katharine Coles, former Utah Poet Laureate and current Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah, joins us today for Access Utah to talk about her seventh collection of poems, Wayward, published last year.
Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn’t afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Coles brings these big questions into small spaces in her latest collection, Wayward, moving the reader at mind-speed through brief meditations on love, marriage, and family; the permeable boundaries of the self; death; and perception.
Katharine Coles is the author of a memoir, Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-Flung Path. She has directed the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature. She has also been a Poet in Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and at the SLC Public Library for the Poets House program FIELD WORK, and was sent to Antarctica in 2010 to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The resulting book is The Earth Is Not Flat, published by Red Hen Press in 2012. She has received grants from the NEA and NEH and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.
