Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, Peter Cole is the author of six books of poems—including DRAW ME AFTER (FSG, November 2022) and HYMNS & QUALMS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS (FSG, 2017). His many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern, include THE DREAM OF THE POEM: HEBREW POETRY FROM MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN SPAIN, C. 950-1492, (Princeton), THE POETRY OF KABBALAH: MYSTICAL VERSE FROM THE JEWISH TRADITION (Yale), and, most recently, ON THE SLAUGHTER: POEMS, by Haim Nahman Bialik (New York Review Books). 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 body of work that defies traditional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom writes, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.” Among his many honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Jewish National Book Award, the PEN Prize in Translation, and, in 2007, a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
