David Keplinger

David Keplinger

David Keplinger was born in 1968 in Philadelphia and received his MFA in poetry from Penn State University in 1994. He is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Clearing (2005) and The Prayers of Others (2006), which won the Colorado Book Award and was shortlisted for the Akhmatova Award for Excellence in Writing. His first collection, The Rose Inside, was chosen by Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize.

He is currently Associate Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches poetry writing in the MFA program.

David Keplinger has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the SOROS Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Katey Lehman Foundation.

His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Copper Nickel, American Literary Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, and others, as well as having been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon, 2000).

From 1995 until 1997 he taught at Gymnazium Petra Bezruc in Frydek-Mistek (Czech Republic) and creative writing at the University of Ostrava. From 2000 until 2007 he directed creative writing at Colorado State University in Pueblo. His essays on creative writing pedagogy, now a book-in-progress, have appeared in The American Voice, Teacher & Writers, AGNI, Radical Pedagogy, Theory and Science, and in various anthologies.

Trained first in the theater, David has written and produced a one-act and a children's musical, traveled Europe as a street performer, and played his guitar and harmonica in pubs and restaurants since 1987.

(Updated April 2008)