Peter Cole

Peter Cole is a senior lecturer in Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature. A poet and translator, Cole has been affiliated with Yale since 2006 and currently teaches classes each spring at Yale. His research interests include translation, Hebrew and Arabic Poetry (medieval and modern), Jewish and Middle Eastern poetry through the ages, and modern American and English poetry. He is the author of five books of poems, and many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic—most recently Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG, 2017). 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 divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Select Publications

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). 

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, edited and introduced (Trinity).