Kate Daniels is the Edwin Mims Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Her teaching areas are creative writing: poetry; American literature: poetry; genre studies in poetry; and the history of poetry by women. She also teaches genre studies in autobiography and creative nonfiction. A particular curricular interest concerns the 19th century origins of American poetry which she addresses in a graduate seminar entitled, Ma & Pa Poetry: Dickinson and Whitman.
Her previous academic appointments were at Wake Forest University where she was Writer in Residence; at Louisiana State University; the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and the University of Virginia where she began her teaching career as a Lecturer in Creative Writing after receiving her M.A. in literature from U.Va and her M.F.A from the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She also taught for several years in the Bennington College Low Residency MFA program in creative writing as a core faculty member. She regularly teaches at summer writers conferences and conducts brief residencies, including recent stints at Breadloaf and the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University.
Daniels has longstanding interests in the many intersections of healthcare, illness, healing, and creative writing, and has served as Poet in Residence at both Duke University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She has explored specific interests in poetry and psychoanalysis by study at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis in Washington, D.C., where she now teaches writing in the New Directions Program. She has organized conferences for the Center on Writers Block and The Writers Voice. She has also made presentations on writing at psychoanalytic training institutes across the U.S., including the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Daniels’ current interests in creative writing as a component of healthcare and healing focus on opioid addiction and recovery – the topic of forthcoming collections of poetry: Three Syllables Describing Addiction (Bull City Press, 2018) and In the Months of My Son’s Recovery (Louisiana State University Press, 2019). She conducts workshops on Writing for Recovery in the Nashville community for The Porch