Sally Van Doren (b. St. Louis, Missouri) is a poet and visual artist whose practice operates at the threshold between language and image, transforming the act of writing into abstraction. Working across poetry and drawing, Van Doren constructs layered compositions where text, calligraphy, and asemic marks merge into rhythmic fields that resist legibility while remaining deeply invested in language's materiality. Her work investigates the gestural, sonic, and visual dimensions of writing, creating systems that function as both notation and pure mark-making. Van Doren's visual practice is rooted in repetition and layering. She works with ink, marker, and paint on paper, building horizontal bands of looping, continuous marks that evoke linguistic patterns—cursive script, calligraphic flourishes, wave forms—without resolving into readable text. These compositions occupy a space between writing and drawing, between communication and abstraction, operating as visual scores or encrypted messages that privilege rhythm, color, and gesture over semantic meaning. Her use of graph paper and ruled surfaces introduces tension between order and spontaneity, imposing structure while allowing the hand's movement to dictate the final form. Her approach synthesizes her dual commitments to poetry and visual art. As a poet, Van Doren is known for precision, sonic density, and an engagement with language's textures—qualities that translate directly into her visual work. Her poetry collections, including Sex at Noon Taxes (winner of the Walt Whitman Award), Possessive, Promise, and Sibilance, demonstrate a sustained interest in form, repetition, and the material properties of words. In her drawings, these concerns manifest visually: language becomes pattern, syntax transforms into rhythm, and the semantic gives way to the sensory. Van Doren has exhibited her visual work in solo and group exhibitions nationally, often in contexts that foreground the intersection of text and image. Her practice operates fluidly between disciplines, producing projects that merge poetry readings with visual installations, creating immersive environments where word and image converge. She has taught workshops at institutions including the 92nd Street Y in New York and continues to write, draw, and teach from her studio in West Cornwall, Connecticut. Van Doren holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She lives and works in Connecticut.