Katharine Coles’ fifth poetry collection, The earth is not flat (Red Hen 2013), was written under the auspices of the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; her sixth collection, Flight, will be out in 2016. A professor of English at the University of Utah, in 2009 and 2010 she served as the Inaugural Director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2012-13.

Paul Hetherington is Head of the International Poetry Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra. His most recent poetry collection is Six different windows (UWA Publishing, 2013). He was a finalist in the 2013 international Aesthetica creative writing competition, and shortlisted for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Poetry and Passionate Thinking

Between 10 September 2012 and 6 March 2013 Paul Hetherington and Katharine Coles conducted an interview about poetry, creativity and creative practice by email. Questions and answers were exchanged one email at a time and what follows is the wide-ranging discussion that resulted—about Katharine Coles’ approach to poetry, some of the ways in which she connects her poetry to her personal experience, and her understanding and practice of her craft.