Dave Harrity is an author, scholar, and teacher from Louisville, Kentucky, and an assistant professor of English at Campbellsville University, where he teaches composition and literary studies online and mentors students through independent studies.

 

 

Much of his scholarship has centered on theopoetics, where poetic making and theological imagination meet. As a member of the founding editorial team of the journal THEOPOETICS, he co-authored, with Martha Serpas and Claire Colombo, "The Theopoetics of Literature: An Aesthetic Statement" (2014) and later followed it with a second installment. The essays argue that theopoetic writing differs from devotional verse, and they trace three overlapping modes, the corporeal, the prophetic, and the mystical, through which it works. Alongside the essays came collaborations: six poems commissioned for L. Callid Keefe-Perry's Way to Water: A Theopoetics Primer (2014); "A Series of Nows," a dialogue with Keefe-Perry for Syndicate (2016); A Distant Place (2021), a collaboration of photographs and poems with Michael Winters; and an interview with Marie Howe at the first Theopoetics Conference. Scholars have since built on his framework in Literature & Theology, Christianity & Literature, and Serbian critic Đorđe Đurđević's Theopoetics: On the Apocalyptic Discourse of Serbian Poetry (2021). He enjoys collaborating with other authors, scholars, and artists of all stripes.

More recently, he has turned to erasure poetics, drawn by the materiality of the book and by the documentary and witness traditions that run through contemporary poetry. The form extends a question that has long animated his work: what it means to read, revise, and remake inherited texts. His erasures have appeared in The Indianapolis Review and Biscuit Hill, and his craft essay "Keep / Cover: Reflections on Erasure Poetry" proposes a taxonomy of the form's modes and functions.