Tulane professor Peter Cooley and his daughter, Nicole Cooley, professor at Queens College-City University of New York, will discuss and read from their poetry collections at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie.

The presentation is free of charge and is open to the public. Registration is not required.

Peter Cooley

World Without Finishing continues Peter Cooley’s search for the “ordinary miraculous,” the subject of his books for four decades. According to the book’s blurb: “In those liminal spaces where Cooley voyages, the otherworldly is a haunting presence, whether in a painting by Rembrandt, the voices of the dead in a Louisiana cemetery for lepers or a mayfly his imagination conjures for its single day on earth. The gods¯and God¯are near at hand and far from us in the mysterious riddling of Cooley’s new poems.”

Peter Cooley was born and educated in the Midwest and has lived more than half of his life in New Orleans, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. A former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, he received the Marble Faun Award in Poetry from the Faulkner Society and an Atlas Grant from the state of Louisiana. He has published nine previous books, eight of them from Carnegie Mellon. He has published poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic and a number of anthologies.

Nicole Cooley

Cooley’s most recent book, Of Marriage, contains poems that “are sharp in all the places it can hurt and soft in ways that comfort an aching soul,” according to the book‘s blurb. “Layers of joy, pain, bliss, frustration¯no emotion is off limits as these sensual yet valiant poems dig their heels and hold on for dear life as winds of uncertainty threaten to overcome.”

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. She has published six collections of poems, including, most recently, Girl after Girl, Breach and Milk Dress, as well as a novel, a chapbook and a collaborative artist’s book. Her poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The North American Review, Narrative, The Rumpus, The Atlantic, and The Feminist Wire among other venues. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York and lives outside of NYC with her family.

For more information regarding this presentation, contact Chris Smith, manager of Adult Programming for the library, at (504) 889-8143 or wcsmith@jefferson.lib.la.us.