Literature and Spirituality: Peter Cole

Peter Cole (b. 1957, Paterson, NJ) is the author of three books of poems, most recently Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions, 2008). This April, The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition was published as part of Yale U. Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters series. A book of non-fiction,Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, written with Adina Hoffman, was published in 2011 by Schocken/Nextbook.  Cole’s other volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), Aharon Shabtai’s War and Love, Love and War: New & Selected Poems (New Directions), Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon), and Hebrew Writers on Writing (Trinity).  Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem  and New Haven, and co-edits Ibis Editions, has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Middlebury College.

 

Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers’ Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, the PEN Translation Award for Poetry, the American Library Association’s Brody Medal for the Jewish Book of the Year, and a TLS Translation Prize. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow.

 

The Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture in Religion and Literature is offered in memory of the former faculty member at Yale Divinity School and Yale Institute of Sacred Music.