photo: Victor Balaban

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her B.A. from Brown University, her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her Ph.D. from Emory University. She is the author of Resurrection (Louisiana State University Press, 1996), which was chosen by Cynthia Macdonald to receive the 1995 Walt Whitman Award. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, was published by LSU Press in 2004. Her poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, Field, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Nation. She won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award for her poetry in 1994, and in 1996 she received a fiction grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She taught at Bucknell University before accepting a position to teach creative writing at Queens College-CUNY. In 1998 HarperCollins published her novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love. Nicole Cooley lives in New Jersey and is working on a third book of poetry, Stabat Mater.