A poet of the working-class and city streets, Jim Daniels' fourteenth poetry collection travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence. Out here, silence scrapes its knuckles in an attempt at prayer. Jim Daniels is Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Melon. Poetry editor for the scholarly journal A Working Class History of America, his awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Awards and the Brittingham Prize for Poetry.
Author
James Raymond Daniels (born 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet and writer. Like his father and many of his friends, Daniels worked for the Ford Motor Company before college. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Alma College in 1978 and a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University in 1980. In his writing, he addresses the issues of blue collar work, adolescence, and determining the role of a poet. The factories proved a setting for many of his poems, which describe the hardships factory workers face. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English. The majority of Daniels' papers can be found within the Special Collections department of Michigan State University's main library. Daniels' literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series. He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
