Daniel Tobin

He is presently Professor of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, where he previously was Department Chair and Interim Dean of the School of the Arts.

The judge of the award, Ellen Bryant Voigt, called the book “a musical Bildungroman… a first book of remarkable authority.” Edward Hirsch praised the book as a “work profoundly alert to spiritual matters” composed of ‘finely wrought poems… in search of the sacred,” and Eleanor Wilner viewed the poems as “darkly devotional… unsparing, unsparing at times harrowing in their awareness.” [5] Double Life gained particular praise for its polyphonic sequence on the life of the Spanish plantation master turned friar, Bartolome de las Casas, and its “Homage to Bosh,” a long ekphrastic poem based on the paintings of Hieronymous Bosh.

[10][11] The book-length poem From Nothing, on the life of Jesuit priest and physicist, Georges Lemaître, won the Julia Ward Howe Award and is part of a proposed three book trilogy.

“Blood Labors is an ebullient and ecclesiastical wonder, capturing more of creation, the uncreated, and the recreated than any dozen books on a poetry bookshelf,” Barbara Ras commented, “[it] dazzles with its brilliance.”[15][16] Ryan Wilson declared that The Mansions ".

In its compendious learning, its consummate artistry, and its spiritual wisdom, this poem inspires genuine awe, and it challenges the reader to think more broadly and more acutely, to feel more profoundly, and to live life more attentively.