UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Award-winning poet and professor Kate Daniels will visit Penn State as the Fisher Family Writer-in-Residence during the week of March 21-25. Daniels will visit classes and work with creative writing students on their poetry during her stay; she will also offer a free public reading at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.
Kate Daniels is the author of several collections of poetry, including "The White Wave" (1984), for which she won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her other works include "The Niobe Poems" (1988), "Four Testimonies" (1998) and, most recently, "A Walk in Victoria’s Secret" (2010).
Daniels has also received the Hanes Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers; a Pushcart Prize; the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry; and the James Dickey Prize, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Harvard University’s Bunting Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Critic James Hunter said of her work, “Time and again [Daniels] re-examines lyric epiphany with the brute language, the cruel music of the everyday.”
Daniels currently teaches and is director of creative writing at Vanderbilt University. She has served as poet in residence at Duke University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is also on the writing faculty of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis in Washington, D.C. Her poems have been featured in numerous journals and publications, as well as anthologized in collections including "Best American Poetry."
Daniels' March 24 reading is part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series, sponsored by Penn State’s Department of English. Additional sponsorship for this event is provided by the Fisher Family Endowment, the Mary E. Rolling Endowment, the Institute for Arts and Humanities, the Paterno Fellows Program, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the University Libraries, and the College of the Liberal Arts.