Brenda Coultas

I’ve been writing for decades. In my teens and early 20s, I wrote short fiction to give witness to the richness and bitterness of life in rural Southern Indiana, a place often dismissed as unworthy of attention. Place is my default. Ed Sanders’ investigative poetry manifesto served as a guide for my earlier projects, and a hybrid of poetry and prose afforded me the freedom and elasticity to describe obscured histories and events, landscapes, and beauty.

I’m drawn to the expansiveness and plasticity of poetry. I like that the rules are imaginary, that we are involved in serious play. I keep in mind what the poet Anselm Hollo said: "treat language like a dangerous toy."

Brenda Coultas is a poet raised in Spencer County, Indiana. In the early 1990s, Coultas studied prose with Bobbie Louise Hawkins and investigative poetry with Ed Sanders at Naropa University. Afterward, she moved to New York City to work at The Poetry Project. Coultas considers herself a third-generation New York School poet—with a few other outrider influences mixed in. 

Her first full-length collection of prose poems, A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003), takes readers on a tour of the Bowery in the early 2000s, examining its significance as the oldest road in New York City with origins in Lenapehoking, and exploring the rapid gentrification it underwent. In the work, Coultas juxtaposes this history with that of Southern Indiana, exploring themes of memory, history, labor, and the changing American landscape. 

Other books by Coultas include The Marvelous Bones of Time (Coffee House Press, 2007), which features two hybrid works: “A Lonely Cemetery,” a meditation on the genre of the ghost story, and “The Abolition Journal,” an investigation of the Underground Railroad in Southern Indiana during the Civil War; The Tatters (Wesleyan University Press, 2014), an elegy for the end of a pristine natural world;  and The Writing of an Hour (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), which explores sensory states of writing and the imagination in an attempt to loosen the grip of narrative on language.

Coultas collaborated with the visual artist Heidi Howard on the monograph Colors Make Us Do Vibrant Deeds (Phoebe Press, 2024). She also contributed the poem "Holding or My Body When I Get Paid" to a collaborative broadside, created in conjunction with the exhibition Elana Herzog: Ripped, Tangled, and Frayed (2023) at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, New Jersey, which featured one-of-a-kind paper artworks by Elana Herzog assisted by Mina Takahashi. Coultas’ work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Hurricane Review, and the online journals Annulet, Folder, and Three Fold. Her essay on lineage, "The Long Arc," was published in Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry (MIT Press, 2024), edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone.

She has participated in residencies at Cill Rialaig Arts Centre, Dungeagan, Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry, Ireland (2025); the T.S. Eliot House, Gloucester, MA (2025) the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva (2020); and the Ucross Foundation Artist Residency, Sheridan, WY (2019).

Coultas holds an M.F.A. from Naropa University (1992).