David Keplinger

David Keplinger (he/him) is the author of numerous books, including Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023); The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021), winner of the 2020 Minds on Fire Prize; Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize; The Art of Topiary (Milkweed, 2017), a collection of translations of the German poet Jan Wagner; The Most Natural Thing (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2013); The Prayers of Others (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2006), winner of the Colorado Book Award; and The Rose Inside (Truman State University Press, 1999), winner of the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2020, Keplinger received the Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

He won the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a two-year Soros Foundation fellowship in the Czech Republic. He has also received funding from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, among others.

In 2011, Keplinger produced By and By (Morpheus Records, 2011), an album of 11 songs based on the poetry of his great-great-grandfather, a Union soldier from Pennsylvania. Keplinger performed and presented the project at the National Portrait Gallery’s Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013.

Keplinger’s translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen have been published in four volumes: The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2007); House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011), which was a Lannan Literary Series Selection; and Forty-One Objects (Bitter Oleander, 2019), which was longlisted for the 2020 National Translation Award. Keplinger’s poetry has been translated and anthologized widely, most recently in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, China, and Northern Ireland. He teaches in the MFA program at American University, where he was named the 2022 Scholar-Teacher of the Year.