A professor of Literature at AU since 2007, David Keplinger is the recipient of the 2025 American Academy in Rome Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize for Literature. He will be in residence at the Academy until 2026. In 2022 Professor Keplinger was named recipient of American University's Teacher/Scholar of the Year Award.
He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023), The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021), winner of the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, and Another City (Milkweed, 2018), which was awarded 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Other collections include The Long Answer: Selected and New Poems (Texas A&M 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. In 2020 Keplinger was selected for the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He 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. 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 (Bitter Oleander Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. His collaboration with German poet, Jan Wagner, entitled The Art of Topiary was published in 2017 by Milkweed Editions. A second volume, Wisp, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2026.
