Peter Cole

Poet and translator Peter Cole has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and currently teaches classes each spring in the Comparative Literature Department and Judaic Studies. He is the author of six books of poems, and many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic. He also serves as co-editor of Princeton University Press’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation.

Cole has several works forthcoming in 2024 and 2025, including On the Slaughter: Selected Poems,  by Hayim Nahman Bialik (NYRB); Requiem and Other Poems, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions); and That Simple?… & That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation (Free Poetry Press, Poetry and Poetics Series, Volume 9).

Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, 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.  He is currently a co-editor of Princeton University Press’s Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, and divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Research Interests

Translation, Hebrew poetry (medieval and modern), modern American and English Poetry, Jewish and Arabic poetry through the ages

Publication Highlights

Poetry

Rift (Station Hill); Hymns & Qualms (Sheep Meadow); The Invention of Influence (New Directions); Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions);  Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG)); and Draw Me After: Poems (FSG)

Translations

The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale);The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton); Taha Muhammad Ali, So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005 (Copper Canyon); Aharon Shabtai’s War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems (New Directions); Yoel Hoffmann, The Heart Is Katmandu, The Shunra and The Schmetterling, Curriculum Vitae, Moods (New Directions). 

Non-fiction

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken/Nextbook), with Adina Hoffman’ Hebrew Writers on Writing (Trinity).