Jeffrey McDaniel is an American poet from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from George Mason University, where he served as editor and poetry editor for the literary magazine Phoebe.
In graduate school, McDaniel began publishing poems in magazines and participated in the Washington, D.C., slam poetry scene, representing the city in national competitions. He remained in Washington after graduating, where he worked at DC WritersCorps, co-hosted a monthly reading series, and performed a one-man multimedia show, Hunting for Cherubs. He moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and got involved with the local poetry community, curating readings, teaching high-school poetry workshops, and bringing high schoolers to the National Teen Poetry Slam each year.
McDaniel is the author of seven poetry books, including Alibi School (1995), The Forgiveness Parade (1998), and The Splinter Factory (2002) from Manic D Press and The Endarkenment (2008), Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (2013), and Holidays in the Islands of Grief (2020) from University of Pittsburgh Press. His most recent collection is Thin Ice Olympics (Write Bloody Publishing, 2022). His writing has been published in journals and anthologies such as The New Yorker, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and Ploughshares. A collection of selected poems, Katastrophenkunde, was translated into German and published in 2006.
McDaniel is the recipient of an NEA fellowship. Since 2001, he has taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Cold Spring, New York.
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More Jeffrey McDaniel
Text: Read poetry by McDaniel at the Academy of American Poets
Audio: McDaniel's poem "The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy" read by Robin Gabrielli for Voetica
Text: Read McDaniel's poem "Raymond" at VerseVille
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Photo by Caroline Kaye Photography.