About
A poet and artist, Sally Van Doren is the author of four poetry collections, including Sibilance (LSU Press 2023), Promise, Possessive and Sex at Noon Taxes which received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been featured in Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Moth, The New Republic, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, NPR, PBS, The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her ongoing poetic memoir, “The Sense Series,” was part of a multi-media installation performance at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. As a visual artist, she exhibits regularly and her work is held in distinguished private and corporate collections and appears in art publications such as the cover of The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (UPenn Press 2022).
A St. Louis native, Van Doren holds a BA from Princeton in Comparative Literature and an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has taught poetry workshops for the 92nd Street Y, the St. Louis Public Schools and other public and private educational institutions. She works from her studio in West Cornwall, CT.
Featured Work
Sibilance
The noun “sibilance” refers to pronunciations of the letter “s,” as in “song,” “chasm” and “sure.” The title of Sally Van Doren’s fourth collection, it alerts readers to the sound of language in the poems that follow in abecedarian order. Sibilance also pulsates in the titles of her earlier books, “Sex at Noon Taxes,” “Possessive,” and “Promise” and in the poet’s first name. Sibilant, the adjective, means emitting a whistling or hissing sound. Like these sounds, Van Doren’s poems probe the tonal registers from joy to despondency that she hears and feels during the flux of mid-life, while tending to an empty nest, a marital bed, an aging mother and an ongoing urge to create.
These short lyric poems arise out of Van Doren’s daily writing practice, in which she has filled thousands of notebook pages with illegible calligraphic handwriting, a sample of which appears on the cover of “Sibilance.” In the midst of this sea of asemic drawing, legible words spontaneously take form for her and drafts of poems float to the surface.
Other Works
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Promise
2017
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Possessive
2012
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Sex at Noon Taxes
2008
Awards and Recognition
- Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets
