Henri Cole

Poet, Professor of Literature – Claremont McKenna College. A master of cadence and the interweaving of rhythms and meanings. Volumes of poetry include Gravity and Center, Selected Sonnets (2023), Blizzard (2020), Nothing to Declare (2015), Touch (2011), Blackbird and Wolf (2008), Middle Earth (2003), which received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and The Visible Man (1998). From 1982-1988, he was executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Berlin Prize, and the Jackson Poetry Prize, among other awards. He has held teaching and artist-in-residence positions at Brandeis University, Columbia University, Davidson College, Harvard University, Ohio State University, Reed College, Smith College, The College of William and Mary, and Yale University. He is currently Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. From 2010 to 2015 he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956, to a French mother and American father.