About
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist working with color, water, language, and place. She makes pigments from stones, plants, bones, glacial melt, and rainwater, forming palettes tied to specific places. From these palettes arise poems, paintings, sculptures, books, and installations.
For her, pigment-making and poetry are parallel practices of attention and transformation that translate between the human and the other-than-human.
Her current work is Memory of a Larger Mind, an ongoing interdisciplinary project that explores the histories and futures of sites of layered loss: places transformed by drought and fire, former concentration and incarceration camps, the waters and lands of dying glaciers. In these places, she forages plants, stones, bones, and water, and she writes. These materials become pigments and poems.
After a loss, a void rushes in. Grief emerges from the void. Eventually, something else comes.
Her work attends to that “something else,” catalyzing its creation.
This process of loss and resilience is a cycle, not a line: a solar system, a cell. Her shorthand for this cycle is “memory.”
She lives in Portland, Oregon, where the forest meets the city.
Books
Chorus (Omnidawn, 2023) — Oregon Book Award for Poetry; Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali
The Glacier is a Being, with Julian Stettler (photography), Sturm & Drang Verlag (Zurich, Switzerland), 2023
Protocols: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025) — Finalist, National Jewish Book Award
Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, forthcoming November 2026)
The Measure of Ana Springs (Artist book, 54 copies, September 2026)
Light / Remains (forthcoming 2028)
Selected Honors
Miller SPARK Award (2025) · National Jewish Book Award Finalist (2026) · Oregon Book Award for Poetry (2024) · The Arctic Circle Residency (2023) · LABA Fellowship, San Francisco (2023) · FestivALT Residency and Grant, Kraków (2023) · Ucross Foundation (2022) · Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant (2021) · Ford Family Foundation Golden Spot Artist (2017)
Readings & Talks
PEN World Voices · Bay Area Book Festival · Tulsa LitFest (keynote, 2026) · Holocaust Museum Los Angeles · Yale University · Cornell University · Emory University · University of Oregon · and many others
Anthologies
Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025)
Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology (Laurel Review, 2024)
The Glacier is a Being, with photographs by Julian Stettler (Sturm & Drang, 2023)
Again a Crossroads: Essays on a Liberal and Progressive Jewish Future, Jordan King-Lacroix, ed. (Ben Yehudah Press, forthcoming 2026)
Difficult Heritage in an Age of Crises (Rescue Memory Consortium, forthcoming 2026)
In This Enclosure Wild (Poetry Society of New York, forthcoming 2027)
Selected Experience
Art Director, Scientific American (2006-2008)
Founding Department Head, Art + Ecology, Pacific Northwest College of Art (2016–2020)
Associate Professor, Painting, Drawing, and Art & Ecology, Pacific Northwest College of Art (2008 - 2020)
Founding Board Member and Backcountry Guide, Signal Fire (2008–2023)
Education
MFA in Poetry, Warren Wilson College (2021)
Graduate Certificate in Scientific Illustration, UC Santa Cruz (2006)
BA in Environmental Studies and Art, The Evergreen State College (2000)