Poet Barbara Ungar , author of four books of poetry, English professor, and coordinator of the MFA program at The College of Saint Rose, will be joining Cole this summer to deliver a one-day workshop for writers! Ms. Ungar, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts and Minneapolis, Minnesota, has degrees from Stanford (BA) and CUNY (MA, PhD), and has travelled extensively.
Praise for Ms. Ungar’s work has been glowing. Samples of the critical reception to her work include:
(Immortal Medusa) “Like any great seeker, Ungar pursues the truth beneath surfaces available to the naked eye. Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment.” —Greg Pardlo
(Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life) “‘I who undulated like an eel now mince on knife-point’: with what glittering myths our culture hooks and reels in its women. In poems at once nightmarishly excoriating and redemptively witty, BLU plunges us into deep waters where these myths are seen joyously refracted.” —Nathalie F. Anderson
(The Origin of the Milky Way) “. . . a fearless, unflinching collection about birth and motherhood, the transformation of bodies. Ungar’s poems are honestly brutal, candidly tender. Their primal immediacy and intense intimacy are realized through her dazzling sense of craft. Ungar delivers a wonderful, sensuous, visceral poetry.” —Denise Duhamel
(Thrift) “Barbara Ungar’s poems embody, with piercing authority, the ebullience of dissolution. She is a master of sudden pathos (see ‘Garment’ or ‘For the Town Clerk’) as well as joy pulled from ‘the used, the worn, the broken in’ (see ‘To My First Address’ or ‘The Thrift Shop of My Dreams’). Ungar’s formal panache offers abundant pleasures, and manages also to be wise.”—Frank Bidart
More information about Ms. Ungar and her work can be found on her website here. The bio on her website is provided below:
Barbara Ungar has published four books of poetry, most recently Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, both Hilary Tham selections from The Word Works. Her prior books are Thrift and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award, a silver Independent Publishers award, a Hoffer award, and the Adirondack Center for Writing poetry award. She is also the author of several chapbooks and Haiku in English. She has published poems in Salmagundi, Rattle, The Nervous Breakdown, and many other journals. A professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, she coordinates their new MFA program.
Mahoney’s bio for Cole reads: Dennis Mahoney is a local novelist who is a graduate of the College of Saint Rose, where he earned his BA. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Morning News, Paste, Opium, and Über. His first novel, Fellow Mortals, was published in February 2013.
On Thursday, July 10, the Cole Summer Writers Institute will take its first field trip! I’ll be
The Cole Summer Writers Institute 