Bill Berkson & Norma Cole

Wednesday

Bill Berkson has been active in the art and literary worlds for nearly fifty years. He is the author of sixteen books and pamphlets of poetry, including Serenade; Fugue State; a volume of his 1960s collaborations with Frank O’Hara entitled Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings; and the deluxe portfolio Gloria with etchings by Alex Katz. During the 1960s he was an editorial associate at Artnews and a regular contributor to Art. A selection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2003, appeared from Qua Books in 2004, followed by Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 from Cuneiform Press. A volume of new and selected poems will appear from Coffee House Press in 2009. He now lives in New York and San Francisco. Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Among her books are Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth. Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 will appear from City Lights in April 2009. 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.