David Keplinger is the author of Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023) and seven other collections of poetry, including The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Minds on Fire Prize and Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Among his earlier books are The Most Natural Thing (New Issues, 2013) and The Prayers of Others (New Issues, 2006) , which won the Colorado Book Award. His first collection, The Rose Inside, was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2020 Keplinger was the recipient of the annual Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.
He has been awarded the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the DC Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Danish Council on the Arts, and a two-year Soros Foundation fellowship in the Czech Republic. In 2011 he produced By and By, an album of eleven songs based on the poetry of his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran. He performed and presented on the project at the National Portrait Gallery’s Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013.
His translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen have appeared in three volumes, World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007), House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011), a Lannan Literary Series Selection, and Forty-One Objects (Bitter Oleander, 2019), longlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award. A collaboration with German poet Jan Wagner, The Art of Topiary, was published in 2017 by Milkweed Editions. David’s own work has been translated and anthologized widely, most recently in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, China, and Northern Ireland.
Keplinger’s areas of interest include contemporary American poetry, European poetry and poetics in the twentieth century, poetic meter and form, creative writing pedagogy, translation and artistic collaboration, and the poetry of witness (with emphases on the poets of World War I, and Holocaust literature). In 2023 he completed his certification in the Mindfulness Teacher Training Program created by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield through DC’s Insight Meditation Community (IMCW). His community outreach in recent years has combined the tenets of mindfulness practice with the reading and writing of poetry, exploring how the written word can hold grief and reflect kind attention.
David has taught at American University in Washington, D.C. since 2007. In May, 2022, President Sylvia Burwell named him American’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year.