Kate Daniels, author of the soon-to-be-published A Walk in Victoria’s Secret and three other poetry collections, has been named winner of the 2011 Hanes Award for Poetry by the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Daniels, associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, will receive the Hanes Award in April 2011 at the Fellowship’s Conference on Southern Literature in Chattanooga. Previous winners include Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa and Ellen Bryant Voigt.
“This award recognizes outstanding literary achievement, and I can only commend the Fellowship of Southern Writers on its perspicacity,” said Mark Schoenfield, professor of English and chair of the department.
Founding members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers include James Dickey, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and Reynolds Price. The FSW was founded in 1987 to recognize and encourage Southern literature.
Born and raised in Richmond, Va., Daniels has spent much of her teaching career in the South: three years each at the University of Virginia and Louisiana State and 15 years at Vanderbilt. She is the author, as well as A Walk in Victoria’s Secret, of three books of poetry: The White Wave, The Niobe Poems, and Four Testimonies.
Nashville residents will have an opportunity to hear Daniels read from her work on November 17 in Vanderbilt’s Buttrick Hall, Room 102, at 7 p.m. The reading, part of the Creative Writing Program’s Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Program, is open to the public.