Poet Cole Swensen was born and raised near San Francisco, and has since lived in Santa Cruz, California, London, England, Paris, France, and Denver, Colorado, working as a translator, editor, copywriter, and teacher. She began teaching at an alternative high school while in her early twenties and has since taught in community colleges and universities. She began teaching full-time at the University of Denver in 1996 and is the author of several poetry collections.

In the American Book Review, Fred Muratori described Swensen's poetry in New Math as "a collection of deft, sleight-of-hand lyrics that teased images or ideas through unpredictably widening or shifting chains of association." A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that Swensen's lyrics in New Math are "elusive, obscure, nearly hallucinatory." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly called Swensen's collection Such Rich Hour, "a very long, fragment-strewn, philosophically-minded sequence."

On the Denver University Web site, Swensen described her teaching philosophy: "I stress writing as thinking—as thinking that creates new territory." She urges her students to create new material and revise it over and over, in the context of a workshop, so that they can hone their own critical abilities and will be able to see what could be improved in their work, and how to improve it. "Education is a process of expansion—expanding strategies as writers, expanding knowledge as scholars, expanding concerns as citizens. Every class should be a community in which students safely and certainly expand their worlds."