A native of Yorkshire, England, Coles was educated at Oxford University and SUNY Buffalo. He co-edited the anthologies Working Classics: Poems of Industrial Life (1990) and For a Living: The Poetry of Work (1995). An Anthology of American Working-Class Literature was published in 2007 by Oxford University Press, and A History of American Working-Class Literature came out in 2017 from Cambridge University Press. Coles is a writer for Working-Class Perspectives blog-site, a volunteer with Pittsburghers for Public Transit, and a member the Pittsburgh-based acoustic band Smokestack Lightning. And he loves the Pitt in London program.