JOHN DANIEL: Brief Biography
John Daniel, a former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor, is the author of ten books of memoir, personal essays, poetry, and fiction.
His newest book, forthcoming from Counterpoint Press in April 2017, is a first novel set during the 1990s in the Oregon Coast Range foothills where he lives. Gifted tells the story of a young man with a spiritual imagination and a rare affinity for wild creatures who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, his human relationships, and the emerging complexities of his own being. Early commenters have called the book “bold and generous,” “a lyrical, soaring tale,” “a transformative novel,” and “a powerful story of family, place, and identity, part Catcher in the Rye, part Sometimes a Great Notion.”
Daniel’s previous books include two collections of essays, The Trail Home (1992) and The Far Corner (2009), both winners of the Oregon Book Award; three memoirs, Looking After (1996, Oregon Book Award winner), Winter Creek (2002), and Rogue River Journal (2005, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award); and three collections of poetry, Common Ground (1988), All Things Touched by Wind (1994), and Of Earth: New and Selected Poems (2012). His work in prose and poetry appears widely in literary journals, nature and environmental magazines, and more than thirty anthologies.
John Daniel has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, a James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, a Research and Writing Fellow at Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary’s College of California, and Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State. His work has been honored with a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
John Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus a cat, a dog, and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His web address is
www.johndaniel-author.net.