Peter Cole reads from his new book of poems, Draw Me After (part of the 2023-24 Quint Lectureship in Jewish Studies)

Poetry Reading, Wednesday, October 18

Peter Cole reads from his new book of poems, Draw Me After (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022)

4:30 pm, Abernethy Room, Axinn Center at Starr Library

Sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies and the Program in Creative Writing

(For information on Mr. Cole’s Quint Lecture, see the listing for Wednesday, Oct. 17, 4:30 p.m.

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Peter Cole is a celebrated poet and translator whose work takes root where cultures meet and where tradition is at once retrieved and extended in vital fashion. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (The American Poet), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a ramifying vision of connectedness that defies conventional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom wrote, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.”

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, Cole has published several books of poems. They include Draw Me After (2022), Rift (1989), Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (2008), The Invention of Influence (2014), and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (2017). With Adina Hoffman, he wrote the nonfiction volume Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011). Described by Harold Bloom as a “major poet-translator,” Cole has translated important writers in Hebrew and Arabic, including Aharon Shabtai and Taha Muhammad Ali. He also edited and translated The Poetry of the Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (2012) and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (2007), a comprehensive rendering of the Hebrew poetry of the Spanish “Golden Age” into contemporary English.

Cole has received many honors and awards, among them fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He is the recipient of a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, a TLS Translation Prize, the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding Jewish literature, and the 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Cole divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches each spring at Yale University.

For further information, contact Vijaya Wunnava, Coordinator, Program in Jewish Studies

Email: vwunnava@midlebury.edu  / Tel. 802-443-5009.