email normacole@mac.com
instagram @normaco
Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her most recent book of poetry, FATE NEWS, appeared in October 2018. Other books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, Spinoza in Her Youth and, Actualities, her collaboration with painter Marina Adams. TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks appeared in 2010. Her translations from the French include Danielle Collobert’s It Then, Collobert’s Journals, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (edited and translated by Cole), Jean Daive’s first book, White Decimal, and Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives, which was a finalist in the 32nd Annual Northern California Book Awards. Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. Cole has taught at San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Naropa University, Otis College of Art and Design and others. During winter 2004/05, Cole could be seen inhabiting a 1950s living room as part of her Collective Memory installation during the retrospective Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954—2004, hosted at the California Historical Society. More recently, she curated a show by Marina Adams at the Cue Arts Foundation in NYC and had a collaboration with Adams in BOMB 114, Winter 2011. For San Francisco Poets Theatre Cole cowrote “Art Colony Survivor” and “Afterglow” with the late Kevin Killian and performed in numerous plays over the years. Her visual work has been shown at New College of California, the Miami University Art Museum, 2nd floor projects and Right Window in San Francisco, and “Way Bay,” an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum. She is a curatorial member of the Right Window Collective, San Francisco.