JIM DANIELS
A native of Warren, Mich., a working-class suburb less than a mile from Detroit, Daniel's poetry reflects the physicality of manual labor, the noises and smells of machine shops and factories, the metallic glint of polished steel and iron. His first two poetry collections, Places/Everyone and Punching Out, set in Detroit neighborhoods and factories, have been described as realistic, gritty, and sometimes violent but were praised for their tough, spare style and unsentimental portrayal of working people's lives. His third book, M-80, centers on urban violence and its aftereffects, while his more recent books, Niagara Falls, Blessing this House, and Blue Jesus changed course with their issues of faith. City Pool (2002), Night With Drive-by Shooting Stars (2002), Digger's Blues (2002), and Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems (2003), followed.
Daniels has edited American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race (Wayne State University Press, 1995), and The Carnegie Mellon Anthology of Poetry (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993). His first collection of short stories, No Pets (Bottom Dog Press, 1999), was made into a feature film by director Tony Bubba. His second short story collection, Detroit Tales, was published in 2003. The book's 12 stories center on Daniels' hometown of Detroit, which he watched go from a gritty but prosperous factory town to an urban wasteland ravaged by riots and crime.
Educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University, Daniels has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie-Mellon University since 1981. He has been
the director of the Creative Writing Program--one of the nation's few such programs for undergraduates--for the past 10 years. Daniels has won the William H. and Frances S. Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching from Carnegie Mellon and the Elliott Dunlap Smith Award, which is given for excellent undergraduate instruction by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He was recently named Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at CMU.
Places/Everyone, won the Brittingham Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. He has also been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize and was included in Best American Poetry 2000. Jim Daniels lives with his wife, the writer Kristin Kovacic, and their two children, Ramsey and Rosalie, in Pittsburgh.
Click here to see Special Collections' holdings of author Jim Daniels' work
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