Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border and raised in England and Tennessee. Mass for Shut-Ins, her first book of poetry, won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and was released in March 2023. Selecting the manuscript, Rae Armantrout called it “Flowers of Evil for the 21st century.”
Daniel’s tri-continental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (Ecco/HarperCollins 2022), was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.
She is an alumna of Yale University (BA), the University of Michigan (MFA), and the University of Southern California (PhD). She holds the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry and prose.