Pure Water: Poetry of Rumi

Coleman Barks was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. He is the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series on PBS, and he is a featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers’s poetry special, Fooling with Words. Coleman Barks is the father of two grown children and the grandfather of four. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Cellist and composer Eugene Friesen is a graduate of the Yale School of Music. He has been a member of the Paul Winter Consort and performs with Howard Levy and Glen Velez as Trio Globo. He received a Grammy Award as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for the 1994 album Spanish Angel, and again in 2006 for the Consort’s Silver Solstice, and in 2007 forCrestone.

Friesen has broken new ground for the cello, using it in a wide variety of non-classical settings and creating new techniques to expand its role as a solo and accompanying instrument. As Celloman, he has performed thousands of concerts for young audiences on cello and electric cello. He teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and lives in Vermont with his wife, Wendy, and children. Friesen and his wife run a nonprofit production company, Sonoterra Productions.