Kate Daniels is a poet with a breathtaking range of interests and voices. She is able to give a voice to the passionate, ascetic intellectual Simone Weil and also write of the domestic felicities (and infelicities) of marriage, child-bearing, and child-raising. Daniels enters the most emotionally vertiginous experiences (earthquake, suicide, divorce, the death of children) and bears away the tragic and luminous truths of our human condition, seen sub specie aeternitatis. (And the above only describes her most recent book, Four Testimonies!) She is a poet whose many voices command, and reward, our attention.
Some of Daniels’s work is featured in Image issue 13 and issue 68. Read a poem by Daniels here.
We were thrilled to have Kate Daniels teach a poetry class at the 2001 Glen Workshop.
Biography
Kate Daniels’ books of poetry include The White Wave, The Niobe Poems, and Four Testimonies. She has received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, a Crazyhorse Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Louisiana Literature Poetry Prize, and the James Dickey Prize, and has been selected for LSU Press’s Southern Messenger Series.
Her twenty-year teaching career has taken her to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Louisiana State University, Wake Forest University, Bennington College, and Vanderbilt University, where she is currently an associate professor of English.
Current Projects
May 2001
“I am currently completing the manuscript of my fourth collection of poetry, My Poverty. The poems in this book have much to do with Southern working class life and race relations both used as metaphors of different kinds of impoverishment. I have begun work on my next collection after that, entitled The Book of Men.”
“I also continue work on several essays that address what I might call issues of mid-life spirituality—a piece on my adult conversion to Catholicism; one on the ways in which the suicide of a parent systematically pollutes family life and the collective imagination; another on the mass. I have notes toward two other essays that connect with Southern identity politics, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Redbone Coon Hound,” and a piece on contemporary country music.”