ABOUT

David Keplinger is a poet, translator, professor, and certified teacher of mindfulness. On April 23, 2025 it was announced that he is the recipient of the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. David 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. Other honors include The Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Prize, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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 and a second, Wisp, will appear in 2026. David’s own work has been translated most recently in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, and China.

David’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 founded The Mindfulness Initiative at AU (MIAU). 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.

He has taught at American University in Washington, D.C. since 2007. In May, 2022, President Sylvia Burwell named him American University’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year.