Danielle Cadena Deulen


Danielle Cadena Deulen is an American poet, essayist, and academic. She is also the host of the Literary radio program and podcast Lit from the Basement.

Biography

Danielle Cadena Deulen was born and raised in Portland, Oregon to Daniel Deulen and Cecilia Cadena. She is half-Latinx on her mother's side. 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 in New Mexico and her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. She received 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 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.

Selected works

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.
Deulen's first collection of poems, Lovely Asunder , won the 2010 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize of the University of Arkansas Press, which subsequently published the book, and the 2012 Utah Book Award. The title Lovely Asunder was taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Deutschland."
The Riots is a book of essays which won the 2010 the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. It also won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction.
American Libretto includes traditional lyric poems as well as lyric essays, whose titles were taken after essays by Michel de Montaigne.
Her second poetry collection, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, won the publisher's own Barrow Street Book Contest. Chosen by Denise Duhamel for the contest, Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us also takes its title from a Montaigne essay.

Honors and awards