Daniel Tobin

Dr. Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2011), The Net (2014), From Nothing (2016), and Blood Labors (2018). The New York Times named Blood Labors one of the Best Poetry Books of the year for 2018. The Mansions, a trilogy of book-length poems, appeared in 2023, portions of which won the Meringoff Award from the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. The Mansions also won the National Indie Excellence Award, Gold in the Human Relations Indie Book Awards for Poetry, as well as being long-listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, finalist for the Poetry by the Sea Award, and Honorable Mention for the Shiela Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. 

Dr. Tobin is also the author of the critical studies Passage to the Center,: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America, On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence, and The Odeon: Essays on Poetry, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2025. He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, The Selected Poems and Lola Ridge, Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge.The Stone In the Air, his suite of versions from the poetry of Paul Celan, appeared from Salmon Poetry (Ireland).  A sequence of micro-poem chapbooks, entitled Gloss Arias, was released in March 2025 from Staircase Books, and his translations from the late poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, entitled Late Songs is forthcoming. His Selected and New Poems will be out in 2026.  

Among his awards are the "The Discovery/The Nation Award," The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Meringoff Award,  the National Indie Excellence Award for Poetry, Gold for Poetry in the Human Relations Indie Book Awards, and creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. 

His poems have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as The Nation, he Harvard Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, DoubleTake, The Kenyon Review, Image, The Times Literary Supplement (England), Stand (England), Agenda (England), Descant (Canada) and Poetry Ireland Review. His essays on poetry have appeared widely in books and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic.  

His work has been widely anthologized in such venues as Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. He has also published numerous essays on modern and contemporary poetry in the United States and abroad.

Tobin served as Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing from 2002-2010, and Interim Dean of the School of the Arts from 2010-2013. 

Photo credit: James Fraser