About John Daniel

John Daniel, a former logger, hod carrier, railroader, and rock climbing instructor, is the author of nine books of memoir, personal essays, and poetry. His new work, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature, published by Counterpoint in April 2009, is a collection of personal essays that explore various subjects in the human and more-than-human worlds, seeking to define his allegiances to his home places and region and the wholeness of life itself.

Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone, released in 2005, is an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in the backcountry of the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon, and also a memoir of Daniel's father's life and career in the American labor movement and of his own growing up and coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. Rogue River Journal was one of six books awarded a 2006 PNBA Book Award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.

John Daniel has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, a James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State University, and a Research and Writing Fellow at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities. In fall semester 2005 he was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Mary's College of California, teaching the MFA workshop in literary nonfiction. In 2003-04, 2004-05, and spring 2006, he was the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in northern New York State. He is now conducting a yearlong memoir workshop through Fishtrap in northeast Oregon.

Two of Daniel's books, The Trail Home and Looking After: A Son's Memoir, have won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction from Literary Arts, a private non-profit that seeks to enrich the lives of Oregonians through language and literature. In 1998-99 he held a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also won the Andres Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the annual John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among other honors.

Essays and articles by John Daniel have appeared in Audubon, Outside, Portland, Bloomsbury Review, North American Review, Southwest Review, and other journals and magazines, and in such anthologies as Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, the annual American Nature Writing series, and Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Sierra, The Pushcart Prize VIII, Poetry of the American West, and other journals and anthologies. His two collections are Common Ground and All Things Touched by Wind. He is poetry editor of Wilderness magazine, the annual publication of the Wilderness Society

John Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn Daniel, plus two cats, a dog, and usually a pack rat, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His web address is www.johndaniel-author.net.