memoir

Former Utah poet laureate KATE COLES is the author of several collections of poetry, including Fault, Utah Book Award winner The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, and The One Right Touch. She is also the author of the novels Fire Season and The Measurable World (1995). Coles has received numerous honors for her work, including both a fellowship and a New Forms Project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a PEN New Writer’s Award, an Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant from the National Science Foundation, and grants from the Utah Arts Council and the Salt Lake City Arts Council. At the University of Utah, Coles has directed the Creative Writing Program; co-directed the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, and served as series editor for the University of Utah Press’s Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Book Award as well as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She lives in Salt Lake City.

José Orduña was born in Córdoba, Veracruz and immigrated to Chicago when he was two years old. His work explores the ways power has determined his and others’ existence as racialized subjects of the United States. His first book, The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement was published in 2016 by Beacon Press. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Photo credit: Lauren Fantauzzo)