Norma Cole & Simon Pettet December 5, 2007

Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Among her books are Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth. Forthcoming from Libellum Press is NATURAL LIGHT and from Factory School a book of essays, to be at music. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. Cole has been the recipient of a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Fund for Poetry, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977. Simon Pettet’s most-recently published book of poems is More Winnowed Fragments (Talisman, 2006). His Selected Poems is also still in print and available from the same publisher. He is the author of two classic collaborations with photographer-filmmaker, Rudy Burckhardt, Conversations About Everything and Talking Pictures, and he edited for Black Sparrow the Art Writings of the poet, James Schuyler. "Like Beethoven's Bagatelles", John Ashbery has written, "Simon Pettet's short poems have a great deal to say, and their seeming modest dimensions help rather than hinder his saying it".

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