Conversation with Coleman Barks on the poetry of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī

The author of twenty-one volumes, including the bestselling “Essential Rumi” (1995) and “Rumi: The Big Red Book” (2010), which collects 34 years of his work on Rumi’s ghazals and rubai, Coleman Barks has spent the past sixty years exploring the possibilities of American ecstatic poetry through his translations of the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī.

University of Georgia professor emeritus of English, Barks was inducted into the Georgia Writer’s Hall of Fame in 2009. An exhibition, Praying Aloud in Public: The Papers of Coleman Barks, opened in the Rotunda Gallery of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries in 2019.