Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He was reared in Virginia and graduated from the College of William and Mary. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1989 he received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship; in 1995 he was the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1999 he received the Berlin Prize; and in 2001 he lived in Kyoto as the recipient of a Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-US Friendship Commission.

Coles poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Paris Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. He has published seven collections of poetry: The Marble Queen (Atheneum, 1986); The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge (Knopf, 1989); The Look of Things (Knopf, 1995); The Visible Man (Knopf, 1998); Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), which received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), which received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award, and Pierce the Skin, Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).

From 1982 to 1988 he was executive director of the Academy of American Poets, and from 1993 to 1999 he was Briggs-Copeland lecturer in poetry at Harvard.