Gbarnga is the capital city of Bong County, Liberia, lying north east of Monrovia. Bong County is one of the over 13 political subdivisions of Liberia known as counties. During the First Liberian Civil War, it was the base for Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia. Cuttington College lies near the town and its campus was once home to the Africana Museum, now destroyed.

As of the 2008 census, Gbarnga has a population of 34,046. Of this: 16,080 were male and 17,966 female; it is the fourth most populous urban area in Liberia.

Gbarnga is the hometown of Tamba Hali of the Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League.

The town is twinned with Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States.

Coordinates: 7°00′N 9°30′W / 7°N 9.5°W / 7; -9.5

Peter Cole (b. 1957) is an American Jewish poet who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.

Cole was born in 1957 in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended Williams College and Hampshire College, and moved to Jerusalem in 1981.

Cole's first book of poems, Rift, was published in 1989, and Hymns & Qualms in 1998. The two volumes were reissued in the UK as What is Doubled: Poems 1981-1988. Things on Which I've Stumbled was published in the fall of 2008.

Cole’s work as both a poet and a translator reflects a sustained engagement with the cultures of Judaism and especially of the Middle East. He is, Eliot Weinberger has written “an urban poet whose city is Jerusalem; a classicist whose Antiquity is medieval Hebrew; a sensualist whose objects of delight are Mediterranean; an avant-gardist whose forms are the meditation, the song, the jeremiad, the proverb.” The American Poet noted that “prosodic mastery fuses with a keen moral intelligence” in Cole’s work, which the reviewer says is distinctive for its unfashionable engagement with wisdom and beauty. Other reviewers have noted the “politically charged” nature of the verse, and Harold Bloom has observed that “with Things on Which I’ve Stumbled [Cole] matures into one of the handful of authentic poets in his own generation.”