Late Invocation for Magic

Jim Daniels has authored more than thirty collections of poetry, seven collections of fiction, and one collection of essays, and has written four produced screenplays. He has also edited or co-edited six anthologies, most recently RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. 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 four Michigan Notable Books awards, the Brittingham Prize in 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 awards in film festivals around the world. His work has been published in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. He has read his poetry on Garrison Keillor’s A 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 into space as part of the Moon Arts Project. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh, where he is the Baker University Professor Emeritus of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

“Jim Daniels’ poetry explores not only the realities of a blue collar, late 20th Century, upper Midwest childhood, but the entirety of America’s sociocultural whirlwind throughout these last six decades. Few writers believe more deeply in poetry’s capacity to document the world, and documentation, in his hands, is a form of homage.” —Campbell McGrath, author of twelve full-length collections of poetry