Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels has authored over thirty collections of poetry, seven collections of fiction, four produced screenplays, and a collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, forthcoming from
Cornerstone Press in 2025. His most recent books include The Luck of the Fall (fiction, Michigan State University Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press, 2021), The Human Engine at Dawn (Wolfson Press, 2022), and Comment Card (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2024). He has also edited or coedited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2020).

He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His books have won three Michigan Notable Book Awards, the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, the Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Award, the Milton Kessler Award, and three Gold Medals in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, among others, and his films have won many awards in film festivals around the world. His work has been published in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes.

Daniels has read his poetry on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and his poems were frequently featured on Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Poet laureates Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Tracy K. Smith all showcased his writing as part of their work to bring poetry to average Americans. During his long career, he has warmed up for singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, read poems at a Jamestown Jammers AA baseball game, had his poem “Factory Love” displayed on a race car, and sent poetry to the moon as part of the Moon Arts Project.

A native of Detroit, Jim Daniels lives in Pittsburgh, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor Emeritus of English at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught for forty years. He currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.