Gillian Conoley with Norma Cole

City Lights presents Gillian Conoley in conversation with Norma Cole, celebrating the publication of "Notes from the Passenger" by Gillian Conoley, published by Nightboat Books. This live event was held in the Poetry room and simultaneously broadcasted via Zoom. This event was hosted by Peter Maravelis of City Lights. You can purchase copies of "Notes from the Passenger" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/general-poetry/notes-from-the-passenger/ Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. Her collection, A LITTLE MORE RED SUN ON THE HUMAN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, with Nightboat Books, won the 39th annual Northern California Book Award in 2020. Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was also awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley’s translations of three books by Henri Michaux, THOUSAND TIMES BROKEN, is with City Lights. Conoley has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, and Tulane University. A long–time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, Conoley is currently Professor of English and Poet–in–Residence at Sonoma State University where she edits VOLT. Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Buhto dancer Judith Kajuwara. Norma Cole is a member of the circle of poets around Robert Duncan in the ’80s, and a fellow traveler of San Francisco’s language poets, Cole is also allied with contemporary French poets like Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Her translations from the French include Hocquard’s "This Story Is Mine" (Instress, 1999), "Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France" (Burning Deck, 2000), Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978 (Litmus, 2003), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s "The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen" (Post-Apollo, 2004). She has taught at many schools, including the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State. During winter 2004/05, Cole could be seen inhabiting a 1950s living room as part of the California Historical Society’s Collective Memory installation series. More recently, she curated a show by Marina Adams at the Cue Arts Foundation in NYC. This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation