The late Coleman Barks was a big force in bringing Rumi poetry to the west. He sold millions of books of his interpretation of Rumi poetry. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. Coleman was the author of numerous Rumi interpretations and was a student of Sufism since 1977.

His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series on PBS, and he was a featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers’s poetry special, Fooling with Words. He was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley. He was the father of two grown children and the grandfather of four.