Life

She is related to Charles Van Doren

Charles Van Doren

Charles Lincoln Van Doren is an American intellectual, writer, and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s...

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She was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

. She is a graduate of Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy

Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...

 and Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 and received an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Van Doren teaches creative writing in the St. Louis Public Schools, and curates the Sunday Poetry Workshops for the St. Louis Poetry Center. She lives in St. Louis and Cornwall, Connecticut

Cornwall, Connecticut

Cornwall is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 1,434 at the 2000 census.In 1939 poet Mark Van Doren wrote "The Hills of Little Cornwall", a short poem in which the beauties of the countryside were portrayed as seductive:The town was also home to the Foreign...

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Her work has appeared in: Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, LIT, Margie, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Daily, Pool, River Styx and Southwest Review. Her poem, "The Sense Series," was the text for a multimedia performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

She read at the Princeton Poetry festival.

Awards

Van Doren was awarded the 2007 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first collection of poems,

She was a semi-finalist in the 2006 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Contest.

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.

External links

• "Preposition" animation, Poetry Everywhere, PBS