Sally Van Doren

Sally Van Doren is an American poet.

Life
She is related to Charles Van Doren. She 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.

Van Doren teaches creative writing in the St. Louis Public Schools, and curates the Sunday Poetry Workshops for the St. Louis Poetry Center. She lives in St. Louis and Cornwall, Connecticut.

Her work has appeared in: Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, LIT, Margie, Parthenon West Review, Poetry Daily, Pool, River Styx and Southwest Review. Her poem, "The Sense Series," was the text for a multimedia performance at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

She read at the Princeton Poetry festival.

Awards
Van Doren was awarded the 2007 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her first collection of poems,

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

Works

 * "Metronome", Verse Daily
 * "Metronome", Verse Daily
 * "Metronome", Verse Daily
 * "Metronome", Verse Daily

Reviews
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."

"“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."