Sally Van Doren

Sally Van Doren was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She is a graduate of Phillips Academy and Princeton University and received an M.F.A. from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

She has taught at the 92nd Street Y in New York, creative writing for the St. Louis Public Schools, Washington University in St. Louis and the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center. She curates the Sunday Workshop Series for the St. Louis Poetry Center.[1] She is an associate editor at Boulevard and an advisory editor at December. She lives in St. Louis and Cornwall, Connecticut.

Van Doren's work has appeared in: American Poet, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, December, Hubbub, LIT, LiveMag, Margie, The Moth, The New Republic, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Daily, Pool, River Styx, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, 2River and Verse Daily. Her poem, "The Sense Series," was the text for a multimedia performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.[2]

Van Doren also read at the Princeton Poetry festival.[3]

Van Doren is related to several other well-known poets and writers, including Charles Van Doren and poet Mark Van Doren.[4]

Van Doren was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “Funk,” which appeared in Volume 29.2 of december magazine.

Van Doren was awarded the 2007 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first collection of poems, "Sex at Noon Taxes," which was published in the spring of 2008 by LSU Press.

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

Van Doren received the Kenneth O. Hanson Award in 2013 from Hubbub magazine for her poem, “Color Theory.” [5] She is the recipient of the Loy Ledbetter Award from the St. Louis Poetry Center. She also was a finalist in the Poets Out Loud Prize in 2012-2013.[6]

• "Roadside Condo Unit # 4; On Belay". Homestead Review. Hartnell College. 18 (1). Fall–Winter 2001. Archived from the original on 2010-05-28.
• "Bagged; Girlhood". 2river review. 11.2. Winter 2007.
• "All, Free, Clear; Fight". 2river review. 11.4. Summer 2007.
• "Metronome", Verse Daily
• "Defiance". The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. NPR. October 4, 2017.
• "The Book Of Usable Minutes". The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. NPR. October 11, 2017.
• "Color Theory". The Art Critic review. Happening in the Hills. December, 2017.
• Visual Poetry at the Cornwall Library: Sally Van Doren's Polysemic Drawings" Lakeville Journal Review. November, 2017.
• "Housewife as Poet" American Life in Poetry. November, 2018.

Van Doren's poetry has also been published in several magazines and journals, including American Letters and Commentary, Cimarron Review, 5AM, Hubbub, Lumina, Mudlark, The New Republic, The Normal School, poets.org, Rhino, South Carolina Review, Tinge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Western Humanities Review. [7][8]

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.[9]

“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.[10]

• "Preposition" animation, Poetry Everywhere, PBS
• Sallyvandoren.com
• Poets.Org