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Brenda Coultas
The Pensacola State College English and Communications Department will welcome celebrated poet Brenda Coultas for a public poetry reading on Wednesday, April 9, at 7 p.m. in Room 2051 of the Chadbourne Library (Bldg. 20).
Coultas will also lead a literary roundtable titled “Writing Your Way Through the World” on Thursday, April 10, at 2 p.m. in Bldg. 4, Room 401, where she will engage in conversation with PSC publication students. All are welcome to attend this thought-provoking discussion on poetry, process and creative engagement with the world.
Coultas is the author of five critically acclaimed poetry collections, including The Writing of an Hour (2022) and The Tatters (2014) from Wesleyan Press, as well as The Marvelous Bones of Time (2008) and A Handmade Museum (2003) from Coffee House Press. Her work is known for its lyrical innovation, historical excavation, and blending of poetic and documentary forms.
Raised in Spencer County, Indiana – the boyhood home of Abraham Lincoln – Coultas studied prose at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, before moving to New York City, where she worked at the iconic Poetry Project.
Her collection The Marvelous Bones of Time includes two hybrid works: “A Lonely Cemetery,” a meditation on ghost stories, and “The Abolition Journal,” an inquiry into the Underground Railroad in Southern Indiana during the Civil War. A Handmade Museum documents cultural and physical transformation of the Bowery as New York’s oldest road underwent rapid gentrification.
In her most recent works, The Tatters and The Writing of an Hour, Coultas explores sensory states of writing, the power of imagination, and the loosening of narrative structure in poetic form – often with an elegiac nod to the fading world of print.
Coultas has also collaborated with visual artists Elana Herzog and Heidi Howard. Her poems have appeared in Pensacola State College’s The Hurricane Review, Harpers, and online literary journals such as Annulet, Folder and Three-Fold. An essay on lineage will appear in the forthcoming anthology Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry.
Coultas divides her time between New York City and Woodstock, New York.