Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks is 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 is the author of numerous Rumi interpretations and has been 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 is 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 is the father of two grown children and the grandfather of four. He lives in Athens, Georgia.