Katharine Coles joins the Festival in cooperation with the Utah Arts Council.

Katharine Coles has published three collections of poems, The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, A History of the Garden, and The One Right Touch, and two novels, Fire Season and The Measurable World; her fourth collection, Fault, will be published in 2008 by Red Hen Press. An ongoing collaboration with visual artist Maureen O’Hara Ure has resulted in several joint installations and an artists book, Swoon. Her commissioned works include Passages, a sequence of poems permanently installed in Salt Lake City at the Gateways Passages Park, for which Coles also served on the design team; and The Numbers, permanently installed as part of Anna Campbell Bliss’s Numbers and Measure in the Leroy Cowles Mathematics Building at the University of Utah. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, where she currently directs the Creative Writing Program as well as, with co-director Fred Adler, the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, which she founded. In 2006, she was named to a five-year term as Poet Laureate of Utah.

Coles' poems, in which she routinely engages not only domestic life and love but also science, art, and history, have been described by critic David Baker as "big" and "packed with ambition." While noting that critics almost reflexively label poems about science as "intelligent," he notes that Coles' poems are "clearly intelligent, but it is less from their literal applications of scientific ideas than from Coles's rich, sensual humanization of ideas" in which "her passions are infused with their intellect … conjoin[ing] powerful opposites."

Regarding Coles’ forthcoming collection, Fault,Melanie Rae Thon, author of Sweethearts,  saysit, “has all the inquisitive intelligence of Katharine Coles' earlier work, the thrill of scientific inquiry, the dazzling profusion of sensory delights. But these poems also soar into song--lament, hymn, jazz riff, ghazal. With the passion of one who knows both suffering and desire, Coles illuminates the miraculous accident of our survival, the mystery of eternity contained by fragile bodies. With fearless grace, she exposes the startling similarity between the tenderness of a lover's gaze and the patient precision of a terrorist touching wires. ‘Happiness must be simple, and enough.’ No matter how dangerous the world becomes, Katharine Coles lights every line with wonder, and with love.”

Linda Gregerson, author of Fire in the Conservatory and Magnetic North, says of Fault, “Whethershe's contemplating the history of cosmology or the stern topography of western canyons, the ‘touched wires’ that detonate the bomb that destroys a city square or the touched chords of married love, Katharine Coles writes with stirring passion and impeccable clarity. Again and again, with nimbleness and delicacy, she locates the precise register of consciousness, the precise figurative or affective cognate that allows us purchase on an abstract realm. Her rejuvenating explorations of inherited forms--pantoums and ghazals, sonnets and quatrains, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, end-, embedded-, and metamorphic rhyme--are revelatory: I know of no one writing in America today who uses these lovely instruments to richer effect, the auditory argument now countering, now corroborating the arguments of heart and mind. This wonderful new book is varied, engaging, and terrifically smart: it merits and lavishly rewards the most mindful of readings.”

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Coles’ current project, a nonfiction book called Burnt Letters, combines Coles' enduring interest in science with an investigation into her own family roots--specifically, the lives of her maternal grandfather, from 1926 until the late fifties an explorer and geologist (eventually Chief Geologist) for Standard Oil, and of her adventurous, sometimes wayward grandmother. In writing this book, Coles combed through and distilled thousands of pages of letters and journals, arranged for her family to donate her grandfather's expedition films to the Smithsonian, and followed her grandparents' trail up the Amazon and to Indonesia and Cuba, traveling alone or with her mother.