Award Winning Author Visits Bend

Posted By:  Liz Goodrich
Date Posted:  9/25/2006

Deschutes Public Library is pleased to welcome award winning author John Daniel for a reading in the Brooks Room at the Bend Public Library on Friday, October 7, 2006. The reading begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The event is sponsored in part by the Deschutes Public Library Foundation. Books will be available for sale following the reading.

Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. After attending Reed College, he worked as a logger, railroad inspector, rock climbing instructor, hod carrier, and poet-in-the-schools. He began to write in the 1970s while living in south-central Oregon. In 1982 he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, where he then took an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and taught five years as a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing and a lecturer in Freshman English.

He now makes his living as a writer and itinerant teacher in workshops and writer-in-residence positions around the country. Daniel’s newest book, Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone, was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in May 2005. This volume, a blend of three nonfiction narratives, is an account of a four-and-a-half-month experiment in solitude in a remote Rogue River cabin, and is 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. The narratives weave together, and the result is a remarkable memoir of the joys and tribulations of solitude, the haunting legacies of a father, and the mysteries of growing up. Rogue River Journal has been awarded a 2006 PNBA Book Award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.

John Daniel lives with his wife, a couple of cats, and usually a packrat or two in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon.

For information about this or other library programs, please call 312-1032.