Biography

David Keplinger was born in 1968 in Philadelphia and received his MFA in poetry from Penn State University in 1994. His latest book, THE CLEARING, was runner up for the Green Rose Prize for Established Writers at New Issues and is forthcoming in the spring of 2005. His first book, The Rose Inside, was chosen by Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts (2003), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2000), the Academy of American Poets (1994), and the Soros Foundation/Open Society Fund (1995-1997). His poems have appeared recently in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Literary Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Rosebud, Green Mountains Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, War Literature and the Arts, Virginia Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, and others, as well as having been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon, 2000). From 1995-1997 Keplinger lived and taught in Frydek-Mistek, a small industrial town on the eastern border of the Czech Republic. His position was sponsored by the Soros Foundation/Open Society Fund and the University of Montana. For the last five years he has directed the undergraduate creative writing program at Colorado State University - Pueblo.