Joseph CoulsonJoseph Coulson was born in Detroit in 1957. His full-length play, A Saloon at the Edge of the World (co-authored with William Relling Jr.), was staged as a showcase production in the 1995-96 T.A.M. Season of New American Plays. He has published threebooks of poetry: Graph, A Measured Silence, and The Letting Go. Coulson has been the recipient of a David Gray Fellowship, selected by Robert Creeley, and the Tompkins Award in Poetry. A literary memoir, short fiction, and literary criticism have appeared in several journals and anthologies including Barnabe Mountain Review, Walt Whitman of Mickle Street, Cemetery Dance, The Critical Survey of Poetry, and The Greenfield Review.

From 1999-2003, Coulson worked as Senior Editor and Editorial Director at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago, a non-profit educational organization founded by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Working with a team of editors, Coulson created and published several books in philosophy, science, and literature, including Modern American Poetry, a major anthology that highlights over forty American poets from Walt Whitman to Li-Young Lee.

Coulson studied at Wayne State University and Oxford University, and he holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His dissertation, Word Music, draws on his experience as a musician, exploring the techniques that poets and musicians share, the similarities between organic form in poetry and improvisational jazz. His talks, workshops and readings, which often include music, have been presented in a variety of settings, including the Michigan Poetry Festival, the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Upstairs at the Improv in Los Angeles, and the University of Notre Dame Literary Festival.

His first novel, The Vanishing Moon, was published by Archipelago Books early in 2004. Read More Read Less