DENTON (UNT), Texas – Washington, D.C., poet David Keplinger has been named the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize winner for his book “Another City.” 

The UNT Rilke Prize is sponsored by the University of North Texas Department of English and has been awarded annually since 2012. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a mid-career poet that demonstrates exceptional artistry and vision. To be eligible, the book must have been released within the preceeding year. 

Keplinger’s “Another City,” published by Milkweed Editions, was selected as the top work out of more than 200 entries. The book features a collection of poems alluding to both an awareness of humans’ inevitable diminishment and the possibility of some vaster sphere to mitigate loneliness and loss.  

“Nothing was itself alone,” Keplinger writes in the prize-winning collection. “In this way, it all grew larger.”

As this year’s UNT Rilke Prize winner, Keplinger will visit campus this spring as part of the UNT Visiting Writers Series. A Q&A and reception for Keplinger is set for 6:30 p.m. April 3 at UNT on the Square. He also will participate in a campus reading and book signing at 8 p.m. April 4 in UNT’s Business Leadership Building. 

The judges also selected three finalists for this year’s UNT Rilke Prize: Ada Limón’s “The Carrying” (Milkweed Editions), Kevin Prufer’s “How He Loved Them” (Four Way Books) and Doug Ramspeck’s “Black Flowers” (LSU Press).

For more information about the UNT Rilke Prize and its previous winners, visit english.unt.edu/creative-writing/unt-rilke-prize.

ABOUT DAVID KEPLINGER

David Keplinger is a poet and translator. His collections of poems include “The Most Natural Thing,” “The Prayers of Others,” “The Clearing,” “The Rose Inside” and most recently “Another City.” His translations include Carsten René Nielsen’s “World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors” and “House Inspections,” a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation is Jan Wagner’s “The Art of Topiary.” Keplinger’s work has appeared in “Poetry,” “Ploughshares,” “Virginia Quarterly Review,” “American Poetry Review” and “The Writer’s Almanac,” and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the D.C. Council on Arts and Humanities and the Danish Council on the Arts. He also has received the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, the Colorado Book Award, the Cavafy Poetry Prize from “Poetry International” and the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from "Smartish Place." Keplinger teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C.