Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her BA from Brown University, her MFA from the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop and her PhD from Emory
University. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection,
won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls,
about the Salem witch trials of 1692, appeared
with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published
a novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins (1998). Her third book of poetry, Breach,
a collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, is forthcoming from LSU
Press.
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She has received a Discovery/The Nation
Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems
have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, Missouri Review, Pleaides, and Mississippi Review, among other magazines. She has published fiction such journals
as The Paris Review,
Denver Quarterly and The Southwest Review. She is a member of the Academy of American Poets. h
She has published scholarly work on women’s
writing and experimental poetics in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Sagetrieb:
A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition, The American Poetry Review and 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.
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