Through the Door
Kate Daniels
Kate Daniels is the author of six collections of poetry, including In the Months of My Son’s Recovery and Three Syllables Describing Addiction. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the Edwin Mims Professor of English emerita at Vanderbilt University.
Former poet in residence for both Vanderbilt and Duke University medical centers, currently she teaches writing at the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, conducts expressive writing workshops for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and has facilitated workshops in a variety of settings serving the addiction treatment community.
She lives in Nashville, TN.
Sheryl St. Germain
Originally from New Orleans, Sheryl St. Germain has published six poetry books, two collections of essays, and co-edited two anthologies. The Small Door of Your Death, a collection of poems about the death of her son from a heroin overdose, appeared in 2018 with Autumn House Press. She followed that book with a collection of essays about her son’s life and her own recovery, 50 Miles, published with Etruscan Press in 2022. She served as Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University for 14 years, where she also co-founded and taught in the Words Without Walls program, which brought graduate students into prisons, jails and rehab facilities to teach creative writing. Her work has received numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and the Louisiana Writer Award.
Having lost a father, brother, aunt and son to substance abuse, Sheryl has long been drawn to writing poems and prose that speak for those who are voiceless, specifically those suffering from substance abuse or those in relation to them. She has also written often about the landscape and culture of New Orleans and southwest Louisiana, specifically the environmental and natural disasters that have been visited on her family and home there.
In 2019 she began making fiber art and is now a full-time studio artist in Savannah, Georgia, where she lives with her husband, the photographer Teake Zuidema.
Additional Poets
Additional texts from Megan Denton, William Brewer, Dana Levin, and N. Scott Momaday
