The 2020 Creative Residents

David Keplinger
Creative Resident — POSTPONED until June 2021

David Keplinger is the author of six collections of poetry, recently Another City (Milkweed, 2018), which was awarded 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Among his other collections are The Long Answer (Selected and New Poems, 2020), 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 chosen by the poet Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize.

David has been awarded the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Erskine Prize from Smartish Pace, 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 11 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 (2007), House Inspections (2011), a Lannan Literary Series Selection, and Forty-One Objects (forthcoming, 2019). His collaboration with German poet, Jan Wagner, entitled The Art of Topiary, was published in 2017 by Milkweed Editions.

David’s work has been included in numerous anthologies in the United States, as well as in China and Northern Ireland. He has taught at the universities of Ostrava (Czech Republic) and Kosice (Slovakia) as well as co-founding and teaching in the summer creative writing institute at John Cabot University in Rome (2015-2016). His areas of interest include contemporary American poetry, European poetry and poetics in the 20th 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). He teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C.

David Keplinger will be in residence at Bloedel Reserve during July 2020.