Paul_Engle_Prize_FINAL_111625

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Cole Swensen has been named the 14th recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization. Swensen is a poet, editor, and translator, who taught in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 2001 to 2012. She then taught at Brown University until her retirement in 2023. She is the author of 20 collections of poetry, including And And And, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Art in Time, Gravesend, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Goest, a finalist for the National Book Award; Try, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; and New Math, winner of the National Poetry Series. Swensen has translated more than 30 books of French poetry, creative nonfiction, and art criticism, and won the 2024 National Translation Award from ALTA and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. She was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a writer-in-residence at Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Pratt Institute, and Temple University. Swensen was the founder and editor of La Presse, an imprint of Fence Books that was dedicated to the translation of contemporary French poetry. Swensen said she was “absolutely over the moon” when she learned she had won the Paul Engle Prize, calling it a great honor. “It instantly gave me a boost of energy and optimism along with a sense of recharged capacity for my poetry, translation, editing, and critical work,” she said. “I had the tremendous pleasure of teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for ten years, and when I arrived in 2001, Paul Engle’s spirit was very present, as it was well-recognized that he had been the driving spirit behind the workshop’s rise to prominence. “His influence was also strongly felt at the International Writers’ Program, which he co-founded. When I taught at the Workshop, the link between it and the IWP, by then under the directorship of the inimitable Christopher Merrill, was very important to me, as it gave students and faculty the chance to exchange ideas with a marvelously diverse, truly global group.” Swensen’s work in literary translation, teaching, and program facilitation is part of what elevated her nomination for the prize. She said such work was inspired by Engle’s “exemplary model of literary citizenship.” “(That is) a term that has gained more and more traction in the past several years, transforming the cliché of the writer as an isolated artist into a much more accurate map of the interactive work that brings literature about—work done by writers, yes, but writers who are also editors, publishers, teachers, translators, critics, reviewers, and non-profit participants, among many other things,” she said. “When writers themselves are doing the editing and publishing, we have more deeply informed, less commercially motivated, and more democratic networks creating our literature. Paul Engle taught hundreds and hundreds of students and others that literature is not just written but also sculpted by collaborative interactions that underscore writing as a basis for community.” Swensen was born and raised near San Francisco. She earned a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University and earned a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a former director of the creative writing program at the University of Denver

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