MFA Reading Series: Peter Cole

The MFA Reading Series presents renowned poet and translator Peter Cole, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. “Peter Cole has been merging the work of poet and translator for nearly half a century,” McSweeney’s wrote, “reminding us that writing is always a translation—of thought, impulse, feeling, memory, image, time […] Cole’s voice is incomparable.”

Cole will give a reading at 7:30 PM on Friday, October 25, 2024, in The Hemingway Center. Free and open to the public, the MFA Reading Series brings renowned writers to the Boise State campus each year.

The author of six collections of poems, Peter Cole’s most recent collection, “Draw Me After” (FSG), drew widespread acclaim. In a starred review in Booklist, Michael Autrey wrote, “It is rare for a poet to produce a book as memorable as “The Invention of Influence” (2014) and then bring forth another title that is just as distinct and remarkable […] An outstanding collection.”  Cole’s many volumes of translation from medieval and modern Hebrew and Arabic include “The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492,” “The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition,” as well as contemporary poetry and fiction by Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yoel Hoffmann, and others. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship.