|
|
|
|
Biography
Click here to read "A Conversation With John Daniel"
Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., John Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. After attending Reed College, he worked as a logger, railroad inspector, rock climbing instructor, hod carrier, and poet-in-the-schools. He began to write in the 1970s while living in south-central Oregon. In 1982 he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, where he then took an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and taught five years as a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing and a lecturer in Freshman English. He now makes his living as a writer and itinerant teacher in workshops and writer-in-residence positions around the country.
A 1996 James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, he has also taught at Sweet Briar College, Austin Peay State University, Lewis & Clark College, Oregon State University, and elsewhere. In the fall of 2005 he was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the MFA program of St. Mary's College of California. For spring semester 2006 he is the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State, a position he also held in the 2003-04 and 2004-05 academic years.
Daniel's newest book, Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone, was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in May 2005. This volume, a blend of three nonfiction narratives, is an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in a remote Rogue River cabin, and is also a memoir of Daniel's father's life and career in the American labor movement and of his own growing up and coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Rogue River Journal has been awarded a 2006 PNBA Book Award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.
The Trail Home, a collection of Daniel's essays on nature, imagination, and the American West, was published in 1992 by Pantheon Books and won the 1993 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Pantheon issued an expanded paper edition in 1994. Daniel contributes essays and articles to magazines and literary journals such as Audubon, Outside, Hope, Southwest Review, Western American Literature, and Open Spaces. His prose has appeared in many anthologies, including The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature and Spirit, Facing the Lion: Writers on Life & Craft, the American Nature Writing volumes for 1995 and 1998, and The Norton Book of Nature Writing.
Looking After: A Son's Memoir, about caring for his mother at the end of her life as she declined with Alzheimer's, was published in 1996 by Counterpoint Press and won the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. A paper edition from the same publisher appeared in 1997. That year also saw publication of Oregon Rivers (Westcliffe Publishers), a collaboration with photographer Larry N. Olson. Winter Creek: One Writer's Natural History came out in the Credo Series from Milkweed Editions in 2002.
Daniel is the author of two poetry collections, Common Ground (Confluence Press, 1988) and All Things Touched by Wind (Salmon Run Press, 1994). Common Ground was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1989. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, North American Review, Sierra, Poetry of the American West, The Pushcart Prize VIII, and other magazines and anthologies. He has been poetry editor of Wilderness magazine since 1988. In 1998 he compiled and edited Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World (University of Georgia Press), a collection of verse first published in Wilderness. A commissioned poem (untitled) appears as a 270-foot frieze in the interior of Fern Ridge Library, Veneta, Oregon. A third collection of poems, Spring Burning, is in progress.
Daniel has won a Pushcart Prize (1983), the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency (1994), the Andres Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction (1994), and the John Burroughs Natural History Essay Award (1995). For the 1997-98 academic year he was a Research and Writing Fellow at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities, and in 1998-99 he held a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Daniel is chair of PEN Northwest, a regional branch of the writers' organization PEN American Center, and serves on the judging panel for the John Burroughs Association's annual Natural History Essay Award. He lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus two cats and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.
|
|
|
|
|
