David Keplinger is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Great Pond (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2028), Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023), and Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Rilke Prize. At the American Academy, he is the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature Fellow for 2025. His other awards include The Colorado Book Prize, The Emily Dickinson Award, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
The value of this institution lies in the time and space it initially offers Fellows and Residents to do their work, but the element of community is profoundly important once you arrive. I completed the project I proposed and began a new one this fall, inspired almost in its entirety by the work of ancient scholars and artists with whom I interact, whether on a walk and talk, a shop talk, or at the long table for lunch and dinner, each day.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
Synchronicities. Finding out that writers I have loved all my career once had studios down the hall from me. Luck. Finding just the write book in the library on a Friday night when the building is quiet and dinner is over. Beauties. Green parrots flying by my window in the morning, in the shadow of Galileo and Garibaldi. The sound of the Monteverde neighborhood at night. Ideas. The exchange that happens consciously and unconsciously with fellow artists and scholars who are becoming, as months go by, dear friends.
Have any encounters –with people, places, new information– opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
I came to Rome to see the Caravaggios. John the Baptist. Paul on the road to Damascus. St. Peter crucified upside down. But I found (again, after many years) the Berninis. St. Teresa in ecstasy. Daphne turning into a laurel tree. And I found the ancient world, walking among the ruins of the Palatine like Shelley did; or the Boxer at Rest in all his bruised beauty; Apoxyomenos, the athlete, scraping the dirt from his arms. I found my inner life, in all its forms, looking back at me in Rome.