Daniel Donaghy is a Connecticut State University Professor of English and the 2023 University Distinguished Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Somerset, which won the 2019 Paterson Poetry Prize. His previous poetry collections include Start with the Trouble (University of Arkansas Press, 2009), winner of the University of Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, and Streetfighting (BkMk Press, 2005), a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist.
A poetry collection he co-edited with the author, Going Across the Water: New and Selected Poems of Harry Humes, will be published by Ohio University Press in Fall 2026.
He earned a BA in English from Kutztown University, an MA in English/Creative Writing from Hollins University, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Cornell University, and a PhD in English from the University of Rochester.
Donaghy’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in many distinguished literary journals, including Rattle, The Sun, The Southern Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, South Carolina Review, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, Quarterly West, Image, Cutthroat, Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Sou’wester, West Branch, Commonweal, december, River Styx, Paterson Literary Review, and Allegheny Review, and has been been featured online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, the Writers Almanac, and Poetry Town.
He was awarded the Paterson Literary Review’s 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize for his poem “My Mother at Christmas.” He also received the 2022 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize for his poem about the Tulsa Race Massacre, “Tulsa Triptych,” which he made into a film, Greenwood: A Dreamland Destroyed, with Brian Day, Alycia-Bright-Holland, and Jeff Calissi that won Best Featured Documentary at the Indianapolis Black Documentary Film Festival. A stage production he wrote about the Ocoee Race Massacre and the history of African American voter suppression, The Ocoee Project, directed by Brian Day and staged by Kristen Morgan, was performed at Eastern Connecticut State University October 15-20, 2024.
Other honors include Auburn University’s Southern Humanities Review Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for Poetry, the Two Rivers Review Poetry Prize, Kutztown University’s Young Alumni Award, Cornell University's Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, Eastern Connecticut State University’s Board of Regents Teaching Award and Norton Mezvinsky Trustees Research Award, two Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Grants, and an artist grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. His creative non-fiction essay “Fire,” first published in The Sun, was named a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2024.
He grew up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which has inspired much of his work.
photo credit: Nick Lacy