Jim Daniels and Kristin Kovacic

Chautauqua Writers' Center Faculty Reading -- Featuring Jim Daniels (Poetry) and Kristin Kovacic (Prose) 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. 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. He has also edited many anthologies, including RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. He is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Other writing awards include the Brittingham Prize, the Blue Lynx Prize, the Tillie Olsen Creative Writing Award, the Milton Kessler Award, and three Gold Medals in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and his films have won awards in film festivals around the world. His work has been published in The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize volumes. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor Emeritus of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA Program. Kristin Kovacic's essays have won the Pushcart Prize, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and the Orison Books Prize for Best Spiritual Writing, among other awards. Her work has appeared recently in Slate, Belt, The Coachella Review, Chautauqua, Table Magazine, The Iowa Review, and other publications. She is the author of the essay collection History of My Breath, the poetry chapbook, House of Women, and co-editor (with Lynne Barrett) of Birth: A Literary Companion. She has taught nonfiction writing at every level, including at Winchester Thurston School, the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, and in the graduate programs of Carlow University and Chatham University. She lives and works in a deconsecrated Catholic Church on the South Side of Pittsburgh.