Name Sally Doren Role Poet | Awards Walt Whitman Award | |
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Books Sex at Noon Taxes, Possessive: Poems Education Princeton University, Phillips Academy | ||
December Vol. 26.1 Event - Poet Sally Van Doren
Sally Van Doren is an American poet and visual artist from St. Louis, Missouri. She was awarded the 2007 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first collection of poems. Her third book of poems, Promise, will be released in August 2017.
Contents
Background
Sally Van Doren was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Phillips Academy and Princeton University and received an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
She has taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York, creative writing for the St. Louis Public Schools, Washington University in St. Louis and the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center. She curates the Sunday Workshop Series for the St. Louis Poetry Center. She is an associate editor at Boulevard and an advisory editor at December. She lives in St. Louis and Cornwall, Connecticut.
Van Doren's work has appeared in: American Poet, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, December, Hubbub, LIT, LiveMag, Margie, The Moth, The New Republic, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Daily, Pool, River Styx, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, 2River and Verse Daily. Her poem, "The Sense Series," was the text for a multimedia performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Van Doren also read at the Princeton Poetry festival.
Van Doren is related to several other well-known poets and writers, including Charles Van Doren and poet Mark Van Doren.
Awards
Van Doren was awarded the 2007 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first collection of poems, "Sex at Noon Taxes," which was published in the spring of 2008 by LSU Press.
She was a semi-finalist in the 2006 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Contest.
Van Doren received the Kenneth O. Hanson Award in 2013 from Hubbub magazine for her poem, “Color Theory.” She is the recipient of the Loy Ledbetter Award from the St. Louis Poetry Center. She also was a finalist in the Poets Out Loud Prize in 2012-2013.
Works
Van Doren's poetry has also been published in several magazines and journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Cimarron Review, 5AM, Hubbub, Lumina, Mudlark, The New Republic, The Normal School, poets.org, Rhino, South Carolina Review, Tinge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Western Humanities Review.
Poetry books
Reviews
About her work, Kleinzahler wrote:
There are no dead moments, no fill: even the conjunctions, prepositions and assorted connectives carry a charge. The language is alive. The movement of language is alive. The mind at work here is at all points quick, full of play and bite.
“A linguaphile’s dream” is the description that comes to mind when reading Sally Van Doren’s first book of poetry, which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2007. Beginning with the palindromic title Sex At Noon Taxes, this collection is all about words and the myriad grammatical devices within the English language. Van Doren’s remarkable ear for rhythm and sound is immediately apparent, and the reader cannot help but be pulled into her obvious sense of joy in language. The strength of this book is the way she fits words together in often surprising ways to create new and delightful effects of sound, rhythm, and syntax.