Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He earned his BA at the College of William and Mary, and his MFA at Columbia University in 1982, and served as executive director of the Academy of American Poets from 1982 until 1988. Since then, he taught at several universities in the United States including Yale College, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Reed College, Brandeis University, and as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. In addition to the Berlin Prize Fellowship, Cole's awards and honors have included fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, as well as the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Cole's poetry has been published in numerous journals and periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Grand Street, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and The Threepenny Review. He has also published four books:

The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998)
The Look of Things (Knopf, 1995)
The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (Knopf, 1989)
The Marble Queen (Atheneum, 1986)