Celebrate Oregon Author John Daniel
Posted By: Liz Gooddrich
Date Posted: 4/24/2009
Deschutes Public Library is pleased to highlight Oregon author John Daniel during the month of May with a series of programs and readings as part of the Celebrate Oregon Authors series being offered through 2009. The programs are free and open to the public.
Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., 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.
Daniel's newest book, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, published in April 2009 by Counterpoint is a collection of personal essays that casts an eye on various subjects in the human and more-than-human worlds—from old-growth forest to death and dying, from the joys of life on the move to the satisfactions of putting down roots. His narratives seek to define Daniel's allegiances to his home places and the wholeness of life itself. This book extends the work that he collected in The Trail Home, published in 1992 by Pantheon Books and winner of the 1993 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction.
He is also the author of the 2006 PNBA Book Award winning Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone , which blends three nonfiction narratives into an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in a remote Rogue River cabin. John Daniel lives with his wife, a couple of cats, and usually a packrat or two in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.
Please join us during the month of May in celebrating John Daniel at one or more scheduled programs throughout the district.