About the Author

---

Rossa Cole is the son of William Rossa Cole and Galen Williams two literary giants from New York City. William was an American editor, anthologist, columnist, author, and writer of light verse. He produced around 75 books, most of them anthologies. Many of his books were honored by the American Library Association. He worked as a publicity director at Alfred A. Knopf, publicity director and editor at Simon & Schuster, and, with Viking Press. Cole wrote the regular columns "Trade Winds" in Saturday Review; and contributed to Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Cole was memorialized in a poem by Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.Rossa's mother is Galen Williams is the former director of New York's famed 92nd Street Y and founder of Poet's & Writers magazine. Poets & Writers has grown into one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the country for writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She was a young mother with a passion for literature, who grew up watching her parents write in isolation, she started Poets & Writers over 30 years ago. Rossa Cole: "My father and my mother were both big in the New York Literary scene, I like to say that I grew up 'At the knees of the greats', meaning I was only tall enough to see the knees of authors like James Baldwin, George Plimpton, Seamus Heaney, Betty Friedan, Joseph Heller and the likes at the cocktail parties my parents would drag me to. As a result, I had no "starstruck" in me, an actor was just a person in the arts, just like me."Rossa Cole - has more than 30 years' experience shooting people. Rossa's shooting style is unobtrusive yet omnipresent. Rossa was the staff photographer for the East Hampton Star, he also shot extensively on the streets and clubs of NYC in the 90's, before Paparazzi was a bad word. Rossa had a column in Black Book Magazine called, "1,000 Words" he was a frequent contributor to New York's Daily News and Hamptons Magazine. His portraits are personable and poetic, showing true character.