Poetry of Place

Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist and poet working with the mediums of language, image, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. She works across forms, melding painting, poetry, prose, site-specific intervention, editing, and teaching. Her work for the past several years has been focused on  issues of climate justice and climate grief. Her mediums are pigment, paper, water, varied types of language, and varied forms of community engagement. Place is always one of her mediums. She uses these mediums to try to shape and nurture generative new ideas, ethics, and cultural change. Her forthcoming book chorus won the 2021 Omnidawn 1st/2nd book prize (selected by Kazim Ali). Her work was also the subject of a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times, has been shown nationally, is in private collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, awards, and residencies. Daniela founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and is an all-around integral part of Signal Fire, providing opportunities for artists to learn about environmental justice by engaging with public wildlands. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, is founding Co-Editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal, and was Art Editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine for many years. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Moss, Tripwire, Bomb Cyclone, Cirque, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and elsewhere.  A member of the third generation of the Holocaust and the daughter of immigrants, she lives in Portland, Oregon, in the Cascadian bioregion, atop a buried headwaters confluence, on the unceded land of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Chinook, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples.