Nicole Cooley



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About

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her most recent book is the collection of poetry Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, July 2024) as well as the two poetry collections, Girl after Girl after Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) and Of Marriage (Alice James Books, 2018). She has published four other collections of poems, Breach, Milk Dress, The Afflicted Girls and Resurrection, as well as a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, two chapbooks, Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence, and Vanishing Point, and a collaborative artists’ book (with book artist Maureen Cummins), Salem Lessons.

Her awards include The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, a Creative Artists fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Her scholarly work includes serving as co-editor “Mother” issue of the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly as well as publishing essays in At Length, Pilot Light: A Journal of 21st Century Poetics, American Poet, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The American Poetry Review, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture as well as in the edited collections Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker and We Who Love to Be Astonished: Innovative Women Writers and Performance Artists.

She is currently completing a non-fiction book project, Dollhouse: A Book of Miniature Histories, excerpts of which have appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, and the Feminist Wire.

She is also currently finishing a manuscript of poems, titled Trash. Poems from this collection have recently appeared in Blackbird, Poetry, and Tupelo Quarterly.

She has taught at Bucknell University and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program, as well in Merida, Mexico with US Poets in Mexico and at the Chautauqua Institution and at the Young Arts Foundation in Miami, Florida.

Currently, she is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation and the English Department at Queens College-City University of New York.

Contact: nicole.cooley@qc.cuny.edu