Professor Cooley received a B.A. in Humanities from Shimer College, an M.A. in Art and Literature from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Modern Letters from the University of Iowa, where he was a student in the Writers' Workshop and submitted a book of his own poetry as his dissertation.
Cooley taught at the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay before coming to Tulane. He has taught in the M.F.A. programs at Warren Wilson College, Vermont College, Western Michigan University in Prague, and the University of New Orleans in Montpellier and Madrid. He has also taught creative writing workshops in a mental hospital, a prison, in pre-schools, grade schools, high schools, and to the elderly, the socially disadvantaged, and the illiterate.
Peter's nine books of poetry are The Company of Strangers, The Room Where Summer Ends, Nightseasons, The Van Gogh Notebook, The Astonished Hours, Sacred Conversations, A Place Made of Starlight, Divine Margins, and Night Bus to the Afterlife. His poems have appeared in over seven hundred magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Southern Review, and in more than one hundred anthologies. His work is in three editions of The Best American Poetry.
He has given readings of his poetry throughout the United States and in Paris, London, Madrid, Prague, Honolulu, Melbourne, and in Wellington, New Zealand, the latter as the US representative to the International Poetry Festival.
The One Certain Thing by 
World Without Finishing by 
Night Bus to the Afterlife by 
A Place Made of Starlight by 
The Room Where Summer Ends by 
Floodgate Series Volume 6 by 
