Poet Katharine Coles has pushed the boundaries of her known world since she was a child. Three years ago, she left the comfort of the Wasatch Front to journey farther than she ever had before. She spent a month living at Palmer Station in Antarctica where she hoped to explore science, life and nature. Coles joins us on Thursday to talk about her trip and the poems it inspired. They meditate on Antarctica’s bafflingly vast land- and seascapes, on the continent’s animal life, and on the people, both historic and contemporary, she encountered there.
Read "Walking the Glacier" by Katharine Coles from her new collection of poetry, The Earth Is Not Flat.
Read "Problems of Description in the Language of Discovery," also from The Earth Is Not Flat.
On Tuesday, April 9th, Katharine Coles will be on-hand for a discussion about Antarctica following a screening of the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s documentary about the continent. It’s called Encounters at the End of the World. That screening is presented by the Utah Film Center. Visit their web site for more details.
GUEST
Katharine Coles is the author of two novels and five collections of poetry, including her newest, The Earth Is Not Flat. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is a former Utah poet laureate and a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, where she co-founded and co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.
