William Rossa Cole (November 20, 1919 – August 2, 2000) was an American editor, anthologist, columnist, author, and writer of light verse.
[2] His grandfather was the Irish Fenian leader Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa.
After military service in the infantry in World War II from 1940 to 1945 (during which he earned a Purple Heart), he took various jobs in the publishing industry, serving as publicity director at Alfred A. Knopf from 1946 to 1958, publicity director and editor at Simon & Schuster from 1958 to 1961, and, with Viking Press, co-publisher of William Cole Books.
[2] Cole's whimsical poetry often appeared in Light Quarterly and was widely anthologized, as in The Oxford Book of American Light Verse and various collections by Willard R. Espy.
[n 1] He was memorialized in a poem by Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.