Scaring Up Some Poetry for National Poetry Month
Please join the Friends of Theodore Roethke and Delta College in welcoming poet and writer Jim Daniels, 2025-2026 Michigan Author Award winner, to the Theodore Roethke Home and Museum. Daniels will be joined by 2012 Kresge Artist Fellow in the Literary Arts recipient and Detroit poet Ken Meisel.
Master of Ceremonies Delta College Professor Jeff Vande Zande will read briefly from his new gothic horror novel before introducing the poets who will each read from new and selected works.
The readings will be followed by the opportunity to purchase books from the writers in addition to informal tours of the Roethke Home Museum.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Parking is available on side streets Larch and Sandra Court.
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Jim Daniels is the recipient of the 2025-26 Michigan Author Award for lifetime achievement from the Library of Michigan and the Michigan Center for the Book.
His new book, Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems, was published in January by Michigan State University Press. He has authored over thirty collections of poetry, seven collections of fiction, four produced screenplays, and one collection of essays, An Ignorance of Trees, published in 2025, recently named a Michigan Notable Book. He also edited many anthologies, including RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He has read his poetry on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and poet laureates Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Tracy K. Smith all showcased his writing as part of their work to bring poetry to average Americans. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program.
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Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of eleven poetry collections. His new book, Chasing Names on Nameless Water, was published in 2025 by Kelsay Press. Other collections include: The Light Most Glad of All (Kelsay Books: 2023), Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022) and Our Common Souls: New and Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020), and The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015). He was the featured poet in the movie: Detroit: Tough Luck Stories, by Mary Sommers. He has work in Crab Creek Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, Wasteland Review, The Glacier.
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Jeff Vande Zande is a writer who is best known for his novel American Poet, which won him the Stuart and Vernice Gross Literature Award. He is also a poet and an editor of the Driftwood Review with two of his poems being nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 1999. His poems and stories have appeared in such magazines as College English, Passages North, and Whistling Shade. He teaches fiction writing and film at Delta College in Michigan.