Mary-Alice Daniel
Mary-Alice Daniel was born in 1986 in Maiduguri in Islamic northern Nigeria and grew up in the UK and the USA. She belongs to the Hausa-Fulani ethnic group and a Christian minority in Nigeria and holds both American and Nigerian citizenship. Daniel has a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University. She held 2024 the Mary Routt Endowed Chair in Writing at Scripps College.
Daniel is a writer of prose and poetry. Her work is regularly published in journals such as »New England Review«, »Best New Poets« and »American Poetry Review«. Her memoir »A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing« was published in 2022. Against the backdrop of her upbringing characterized by migration, the author explores racial, religious, and cultural conflicts and explores family traditions, indigenous West African myths, and questions of identity and belonging. A year later, Daniel published her first volume of poetry, »Mass for Shut-Ins« (2023), which won a California Book Award. In it, she draws on animist, Islamic, and syncretic Christian traditions from Nigeria to create an uncanny universe of African and Western myths and modern rituals.
»Mass for Shut-Ins« was awarded the 2022 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and nominated for the 2024 California Book Award in the poetry category. Rae Armantrout, a member of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize jury, described the poetry collection as an »exploration of nature and the place of hell« and drew a parallel to Charles Baudelaire, calling the work »The Flowers of 21st Century Evil«.
Daniel is currently writing a non-fiction book on the global myth of the Nigerian diaspora as well as her second book of poetry, titled »Random Acts of Kindness«. As of September 2024, she will be a scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey. The author lives in California.
Status: May 2024
A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing. A Memoir Across Three Continents
Ecco
New York, 2022
Mass for Shut-Ins
Yale University Press
New Haven, 2023