About Peter Cooley

Mr. Cooley is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane. He has a B.A. in Humanities from Shimer College, an M.A. in Art and Literature from The University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Modern Letters from The University of Iowa, where he was a student in the Writers’ Workshop.

His eight books of poetry are The Company of Strangers, The Room Where Summer Ends, Nightseasons, The Van Gogh Notebook, The Astonished Hours, Sacred Conversations, A Place Made of Starlight. Carnegie Mellon, his publisher, released his new volume Divine Margins, in 2009.

Peter’s poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic and in over one hundred anthologies including most recently The Best American Poetry 2002, The Manthology, Poets on Place and Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website. From 1970- 2000 he was Poetry Editor of The North American Review.

His particular interests are creative writing, poetics and contemporary literature. In addition to workshops in creative writing, he has taught Surrealism in Contemporary Poetry, Confessional Poets and Poetics for Poets.

Peter has given recent poetry readings of his own work on the Ohio Poetry Circuit, in Spain and France, in New Zealand, where he was the U.S. Representative to the International Poetry Festival, in the Czech Republic, and in Cape Town, South Africa. He received the Inspirational Professor Award in 2001 and the Newcomb Professor of the Year Award in 2003.

The Company of Strangers (University of Missouri Press, 1975)

Nightseasons (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1983)

The Van Gogh Notebook (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2004)

The Astonished Hours (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1992)

Sacred Conversations (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1998)

The Room Where Summer Ends (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1999)

A Place Made of Starlight (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2002)

Divine Margins (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2009)