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David Caplan is the Daisy Deane Frensley Chair in English Literature and the author of seven books of literary criticism and poetry. Caplan’s main research areas are poetry, poetics, and American literature. He has presented his research and given poetry readings in Belgium, Canada, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Germany, and Portugal, and his scholarship has been translated into French and Urdu. A contributing editor to Pleiades and the Virginia Quarterly Review, an Affiliated Researcher (Chercheur Affilié) with the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poétique Appliquée, and an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa, Caplan chaired the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association's Creative Writing Forum and currently serves on the Executive Board of the International Network for the Study of Lyric.

He also is the Founding Director of ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½ Project Poëtica, an initiative which aims to make ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½ a hub of the English poetry world. Project Poëtica hosts the biennial ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½ Symposium on Poetic Form and three book lines of poetry and poetry scholarship with Bridwell Press, as well as numerous events on campus and in greater Dallas. More information about ÕýÆ·À¶µ¼º½ Project Poëtica can be found at /dedman/academics/departments/english/project-poetica and on Instagram @

Caplan’s current projects are God Loves Poetry: Contemporary American Poetry and Religion (under contract to Cambridge University Press) and North Shore (poems), forthcoming from Ben Yehuda Press.

Awards and Distinctions

• Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review 
• Individual Excellence Award in Criticism, Ohio Arts Council
• Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature, University of Liège (twice)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow in Poetics, Emory University, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Selected Publications

• American Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• Into My Garden (poems) (Ben Yehuda Press, 2020)
• On Rhyme (Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2017)
• Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• In the World He Created According to His Will (poems) (University of Georgia Press, 2010)
• Poetic Form: An Introduction (Pearson Longman, 2006)
• Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback edition, 2006). French edition, Questions de Possibilité, Poésie Contemporaine et Forme Poétique (Liège, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2016)