Cole Swensen

Cole Swensen is an American poet, editor, and translator. She is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry, including Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021); On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017); Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry;Stele (Post-Apollo Press, 2012); Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010); Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; and New Math (William Morrow & Co, 1988), winner of the National Poetry Series. 

Swensen has translated over 20 books of French poetry, creative nonfiction, and art criticism. Her translation of Lazy Suzie by Suzanne Doppelt (Litmus Press, 2014) was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award awarded by Three Percent; her translation of Island of the Dead by Jean Frémon (Green Integer, 2002) won the 2004 PEN USA Award for Literary Translation; and her translation of Frémon’sNow, Now, Louison (New Directions, 2019) was a French-American Foundation Translation Prize finalist. 

She was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Pratt Institute, and Temple University. Swensen was the founder and editor of La Presse, an imprint of Fence Books that was dedicated to the translation of contemporary French poetry.A book of her essays on poetry, Noise That Stays Noise, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011.

Swensen was born and raised near San Francisco. She earned a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University and earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a former director of the creative writing program at the University of Denver and taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is a professor in the literary arts program at Brown University.