Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and elsewhere
Read: “Mother Water Ash” (Poets.org)
Purchase: MOTHER WATER ASH (Louisiana State University Press 2024)
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of seven books of poems, most recently MOTHER WATER ASH (Louisiana State University Press 2024), as well as OF MARRIAGE (Alice James Books 2018), GIRL AFTER GIRL AFTER GIRL (LSU Press 2018) and BREACH (LSU Press 2010). She has received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA grant, and the Emily Dickinson Award from The Poetry Society of America, and most recently a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Arts. She is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York and lives in NJ with her family.
Reading Recommendations:
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith
The Dream of Reason by Jenny George
The Poet in the World by Denise Levertov
The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat
Against Forgetting by Carolyn Forche
Orbit by Victoria Chang
Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel
“A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay
Of Poetry Podcast 