John Daniel was born in South Carolina, raised mainly in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and educated at Reed College. He stayed in the greater Pacific Northwest, from the Bay Area north to Southeast Alaska, working as a logger, railroader, mortar man for a mason, rock climbing instructor, and breakfast cook before turning to writing as a last resort. Daniel has taught creative writing-poetry and prose-at Stanford, Ohio State, Saint Mary's College of California, Sweet Briar College, and St. Lawrence University, along with brief stints elsewhere. Poetry editor of Wilderness Magazine for twenty years, he edited Wild Song, the anthology of poems first published there. Through 2022 he was chair of PEN Northwest and administered the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency in the Rogue River Canyon. He now sidelines as a freelance writing coach and editor. Daniel's work has been honored with three Oregon Book Awards, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a research and writing fellowship at Oregon State University's Center for the Humanities, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. John Daniel lives on a rampant acre of tall Douglas-firs and vicious blackberry thickets in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, and spends time every year over the Cascades on the dry side of the state, where Lighted Distances found voice. His wife, Marilyn Matheson Daniel, is a retired environmental engineer and active art quilter. The cover image of Lighted Distances is excerpted from one of her works.
