Norma Cole is a poet, translator, visual artist, and educator. Born in Toronto, Canada, she learned French at an early age and received her B.A. in Modern Languages and Literature and M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. She lived near Nice for several years, forming relationships with several French writers, and began to work with visual art. Following a return to Toronto to complete a degree in early childhood education, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. While taking classes at New College of California, she met Robert Duncan and Jess and a group of poets including Michael Palmer, Laura Moriarty, and Aaron Shurin. During this time she also traveled to France where she met Claude Royet-Journoud and Emmanuel Hocquard, whose work she translated into English.

Her other translation works include Danielle Collobert’s It, Then (1989), Anne Portugal’s Nude (2001), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properities Of Nitrogen (2004). She also edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000), an anthology of poetry and poetics by contemporary French writers.

Cole’s books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (Omnidawn, 2012), Natural Light (2009), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 (2009), Spinoza in Her Youth (2002), The Vulgar Tongue (2000), and Desire and Its Double (1998). Her experimental work SCOUT (Krupskaya, 2005), incorporated both text and image. From 2004 to 2006, Cole was the lead artist for Collective Memory, an installation, performance, and publication for “Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004” commissioned by the California Historical Society in San Francisco, California. The artists’ book Collective Memory was published by Granary Books in 2006.

Cole’s various awards include a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and awards from the Fund for Poetry.

Cole has held adjunct and visiting professorships and residencies at over two dozen institutions, including the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, the Naropa Institute, the University of California, Berkeley, St. Mary’s College, Temple University, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She lives in San Francisco.