Poet of the Month

<body link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080"> <font size="5"><p>Poet of the Month: Kate Daniels</p> </font><p>Your browser does not support the frame format of this site. To view the site in a more conventional format, click <a href="../boisseau/contents.html">HERE</a>.</p> <p>Kate Daniels was bornKatherine Anne Danielsin Richmond, Virginia, on July 2, 1953. Her mother, from Warrington, England, near the Manchester Ship Canal, was a British war bride who had been married to a U.S. serviceman for two years before she divorced him and married Daniels' father in 1952. Kate Daniels was raised on the Southside of Richmond in the working class environment of her father's family. She absorbed her mother's frustrated ambitions to become a writer, and from the age of five, she created poems, stories, and songs.</p> <p>Daniels began working at age fourteenhired as a shampoo girl in a beauty salonand continued working in various clerical and food service positions throughout high school and college. Except for one uncle on her mother's side, she was the first member of her entire family to attend college. At the University of Virginia, she majored in English. While there, she studied poetry writing with Alan Williamson and Louise Glück and fiction writing with John Casey. She also took a biography writing course with Emily Hahn. For a year after graduation in 1975, she worked as a nurse's aid at the University of Virginia Medical Center. From 1976 to 77, she undertook a master's degree in English literature at Virginia, which she received in 1977. (Peter Taylor was her advisor.) It was during this period that she began studying poetry writing with Gregory Orr, who had just begun teaching at Virginia. Under his guidance, she began to submit poems for publication, and to have some success in little magazines.</p> <p>From 1977 to 78, Daniels lived in Los Angeles with Richard Jones (also a poet and a U.Va. alum), whom she married in 1978. She worked as an information specialist for <i>The Los Angeles Times</i> and part-time as a library aide at the Beverly Hills Public Library. In the spring of 1978, she was accepted with a fellowship to the M.F.A. program at Columbia University. From 1978 to 80, she lived in New York City. As a student at Columbia, she worked with Carol Muske, Stanley Kunitz, Joseph Brodsky, Daniel Halpern, Edward Mendelson, Donald Justice, Louise Glück, and Amiri Baraka. She served as poetry editor of <i>Columbia, a Magazine of Poetry & Prose</i>, and as an editorial assistant for <i>Antaeus</i> and The Ecco Press. It was also during this time that she and Jones began publishing <i>Poetry East</i>.</p> <p>In 1980, the University of Virginia hired Daniels as a part-time lecturer in creative writing, and she returned to Charlottesville, living there until 1984, teaching and editing <i>Poetry East</i>. In 1983, Daniels' first book of poems, <i>The White Wave</i>, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award from the University of Pittsburgh Press. It was published in 1984. That year Daniels also accepted a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University. She and Jones separated in 1984 and divorced in 1985. Shortly after she arrived in Cambridge, her nephew, Andrew Minton, drowned in Norfolk, Virginia. The death of this five year old boy and its effect on her and on her in-laws (she was related to him through marriage) became the subject of her second book of poems, <i>The Niobe Poems</i>, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1988.</p> <p>During the year in Cambridge, Daniels worked on a biographical project related to the American poet Muriel Rukeyser. Although she was planning a full-length biography, that work has not yet been completed. She has edited the selected poems of Rukeyser, published by Triquarterly Press in 1992, and has written and lectured extensively on Rukeyser and her work.</p> <p>During the 1985-86 academic year, Daniels lived in Gainesville, Florida, with Geoff Macdonald, a former professional tennis player who was working on an M.F.A. in fiction writing at the University of Florida.  Their son, Samuel Graham, was born in Gainesville in January of 1986. From 1986 to 88, Daniels lived in Northampton, Massachusetts where she was an assistant professor in the M.F.A. program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She and Macdonald married in September of 1986. In 1988, they moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Daniels became an associate professor of English and director of the undergraduate creative writing program (eventually, director of both graduate and undergraduate creative writing), and Macdonald was head coach of women's tennis, both at LSU. Their second son, Peter Augustus, was born in December of 1990. During this period, Daniels, who was raised as a Baptist, began the process of converting to Catholicism through the church's Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults.</p> <p>In 1991, Daniels resigned her tenured position at LSU to move with her family to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband had accepted a head coaching job at Duke University. From 1992 to 94, Daniels was poet in residence at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. In addition, she served as Duke University Medical Center's poet in residence. In July of 1993, her daughter Margaret Jane Macdonald was born, one day shy of Daniels' fortieth birthday.</p> <p>In December of 1994, Daniels and her family moved once again, this time to Nashville Tennessee, where Macdonald became head coach of women's tennis at Vanderbilt University and Daniels began teaching creative writing part-time in the English department and serving as poet in residence for the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. For two years, from June 1995 to May 1997, she was a member of the core faculty of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Bennington College. In April of 1996, she was received into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil.</p> <p>Currently, Daniels resides in Nashville. Her third book of poems, <i>Four Testimonies</i>, will be published by LSU Press in March of 1998, a selection in the Southern Messenger Series, edited by Dave Smith. She is working on a fourth book, <i>My Poverty</i>. Poems from <i>Four Testimonies</i> appeared in the fall 1997 issues of <i>Southern Review</i> and <i>Five Points</i>. In addition, she is working on a series of essays related to domesticity and spirituality, collectively entitled <i>The Bloom</i>, and is editing an anthology of essays on contemporary Southern women writers on literary origins and identity. The rest of the time she passes herself off when necessary (often) as a soccer mom, cares for her family's redbone coonhound, Maggie May, and is very involved with St. Ann Catholic Church, of which she is a member and where her children attend school.</p> <p><br> <br> </p> </body>