Danielle Cadena Deulen

Danielle Cadena Deulen (born 1979) is an American poet and essayist.

Biography

Danielle Cadena Deulen was born and raised in Portland, Oregon to Daniel Deulen and Cecilia Cadena. Much of her early life is explored in her personal essay collection, ‘’The Riots’’. She received her BA in English at the College of Santa Fe (now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design) in New Mexico and her MFA in poetry from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She moved to Wisconsin to receive a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship from the Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and went on to earn her doctorate in English (with a specialization in Creative Nonfiction) from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. After graduating from the University of Utah, she became an assistant professor for the creative writing doctoral program at the University of Cincinnati, but left the position in 2015 for a position at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She currently resides in Oregon with her husband J. Max Stinson, and their two sons.

Work

Deulen’s first collection of poems, Lovely Asunder[1] (U. of Arkansas Press, 2011), won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir, The Riots[2] (U. of Georgia Press, 2011), won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Her second poetry collection, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us,[3] won the Barrow Street Book Contest and was published with Barrow Street Press in 2015. She has also published a chapbook with Sow’s Ear Press, titled American Libretto[4] in the summer of 2015. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Diagram, The Kenyon Review, Utne Reader, and The Missouri Review, as well as several anthologies, including Best New Poets and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays.

Lovely Asunder[1]

The title of Deulen’s first poetry collection, Lovely Asunder,[1] was taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hopkins uses the phrase to describe starlight in a poem about the drowning of five Franciscan nuns. She amplifies and modifies this description to include other bright yet tragic female figures of western religion and myth (Eve, Lilith, Joan of Arc, Persephone), as well as many other unnamed female speakers.

The Riots[2]

Chosen by Luís Alberto Urrea for the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction, Deulen’s first book of personal essays, The Riots,[2] draws mostly from personal experience and explores the attractions and dangers of intimacy—how ideas of class, race, gender, and disability construct social and psychological barriers within close relationships. Structurally, the essays in the collection are diverse, alternating traditional narratives with flash lyric essays and collages that characterize a particular time, place, and sensibility. This well-received collection launched Deulen into the contemporary literary scene as one of the few Latina essayists publishing in the country.

American Libretto[4]

American Libretto[4] includes traditional lyric poems as well as lyric essays. These “lyric essays” all take their titles after essays by Michel de Montaigne, and like Montaigne’s essays these poems juxtapose stories of personal experience with philosophy, politics, and ancient knowledge, moving from point to point by associative leaps rather than carefully arranged logical arguments. Throughout the manuscript the image of fire recurs as a metaphor for both destruction and renewal. The most prominent theme in the book is that of “awakening.” The speakers of these poems seem always to be “waking to the light of our failures,” (from “We Are Bored”) determined, this time, to see the world more clearly—to get the story right.

Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us[3]

Chosen by Denise Duhamel for the Barrow Street Book Contest, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us[3] explores contemporary issues, raising questions about how Western philosophical and sociological structures perpetuate a culture of violence in America. The title was taken from an essay by Michel de Montaigne, who writes, “We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope impel us toward the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be—even when we ourselves shall be no more.” The book both upholds and challenges this idea, showing how the realm of emotions—of irrationality, of imagination—is the source of both violence and beauty, destruction and creation, war and art.

Honors and Awards

2014 Barrow Street Book Contest for Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us[3]

2014 The Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook Competition for American Libretto[4]

2014 Individual Excellence Award, Ohio Arts Council

2013 Finalist for Montreal International Poetry Prize for “Transit”

2012 Taft Summer Research Fellowship, University of Cincinnati

2012 Great Lakes Association New Writers Award for The Riots

2011 Utah Book Award for Lovely Asunder

2011 Grub Street National Book Prize (honorable mention) for The Riots

2010 AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction for The Riots

2010 Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Lovely Asunder

2010 Smartish Pace Beullah Rose Poetry Prize (Third Place) for “Jung at the Harbor”

2009 Meridian and Samovar Press Best New Poets Award for “Lovely”

2009 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize for “Threshold,” and “Tomato”

2008 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, Madison

2007 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize for “Speak X” and “How to Pray”

2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize for “For You,” “For My Sister…”

2006 Residency Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts

Author's Website

Danielle’s Website

External links

Reviews

References

  1. 1 2 3 Deulen, Danielle Cadena (2011). Lovely Asunder. University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 9781610754781.
  2. 1 2 3 Deulen, Danielle Cadena (2011). The Riots. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-4438-6.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Deulen, Danielle Cadena (2015). Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us. Barrow Street Press. ISBN 978-0989329675.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Deulen, Danielle Cadena (2015). American Libretto. Sow's Ear Press.
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