Coleman Barks
| Coleman Barks | |
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| Born | Coleman Bryan Barks April 23, 1937 Chattanooga, Tennessee, |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Genre | American poetry |
| Notable works | Gourd Seed, The Essential Rumi |
| Spouse | Kittsu Greenwood (1962 - divorced) |
| Children | Benjamin, Cole |
| Website | |
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Coleman Barks (born April 23, 1937) is an American poet, and former literature faculty at the University of Georgia. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations.
Barks is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended the Baylor School as a teenager, then studied collegiately at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley.
Barks taught literature at the University of Georgia for three decades.
Barks makes frequent international appearances and is well known throughout the Middle East. Barks' work has contributed to an extremely strong following of Rumi in the English-speaking world. Due to his work, the ideas of Sufism have crossed many cultural boundaries over the past few decades. Coleman Barks received an honorary doctorate from Tehran University in 2006.
He has also read his original poetry at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. In March 2009 Barks was inducted to the Georgia Writers' Hall of Fame.
He currently lives in Athens, Georgia, where he interprets the writings of Rumi and composes poetry of his own. In early 2011, Barks suffered a stroke that has somewhat impaired his speech and has resulted in at least one cancelled appearance.
Barks has published several volumes of his interpretations of Rumi's poetry since 1976, including The Hand of Poetry, Five Mystic Poets of Persia in 1993, The Essential Rumi in 1995 and The Book of Love in 2003.
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Wikipedia