Biographies
William O’Daly
William O’Daly was raised in the San Fernando Valley of California and, as a teen, frequented the backpacking trails of the southern Sierra Nevada. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), as an economics major but before the end of his freshman year turned to literature and the writing of poetry. At UCSB, he studied with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Stephens, Fredrick Turner, and John Ridland, and with modernist critic Hugh Kenner; under friend and mentor Sam Hamill, he served as assistant editor of Spectrum magazine. In 1972, he left UCSB for Denver, Colorado, where he co-founded Copper Canyon Press with Hamill, Tree Swenson, and Jim Gautney.
O’Daly’s published works include eight books of translation of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight — all published by Copper Canyon Press. Book of Twilight was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Translation of Poetry for 2018. Books of his own poems include The New Gods (Beltway Editions), The Whale in the Web (Copper Canyon), as well as Yarrow and Smoke, Waterways (a collaboration with JS Graustein), and The Road to Isla Negra, the latter three published by Folded Word Press. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he wrote a historical novel, This Earthly Life, set amid the fascinating and deadly Chinese Cultural Revolution. This Earthly Life was selected a “Finalist” in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Fall Story Contest.
A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and, as a finalist, was profiled by NBC news correspondent Mike Leonard for The Today Show. In September 2021, he received the American Literary Award from the bilingual Korean American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous journals and as part of multimedia exhibits and performances. He has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design and served on the national board of Poets Against War.
Currently residing in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, he is Lead Writer for the California Water Plan, the state’s strategic plan for sustainably and equitably managing water resources.
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Eliecer Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, in 1904. His mother died when he was two months, and he was raised by his stepmother and his father, a stern ballast-train engineer, in the frontier town of Temuco. He loved the natural world of the south, made muddy and lush by incessant winter rains, and began writing poetry at an early age. Mentored by the poet Gabriela Mistral, the principal of a local school, he published and received honors for his work at an early age. In 1921 he left Temuco to study French in Santiago. He later applied to the diplomatic corps, served as consul in Burma (now Myanmar), and held posts in various East Asian and European countries. In 1945, with his poetry having gained a wide international following, Neruda was elected to the Chilean senate. Shortly thereafter, when Chile’s political climate took a sudden turn to the right, Neruda fled on horseback over the Andes and lived as an exile for many years. Beloved by the Chilean people and looked upon wearily by the Chilean aristocracy and the right wing (though nearly all Chileans can recite at least two of his love poems), his poetry garnered prizes the world over. His collected works would eventually span five large volumes. In 1970 he was appointed Chile’s ambassador to France, and in 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1973, twelve days after the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power and ended Chilean democracy for almost two decades.
