David B. Prather's first collection, We Were Birds, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing in 2019. He has another full-length poetry collection, Shouting at an Empty House, forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. He served as a juror for Ohio State Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour's anthology, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices. He is a past president of West Virginia Writers, Inc., a statewide non-profit organization. He taught English Composition, American Literature, and Creative Writing at West Virginia University at Parkersburg and English Composition at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio. He also served as poetry editor for Confluence Literary Journal and for Tantra Press, and he hosted the Blennerhassett Reading Series. He currently serves as a reader for Suburbia Journal. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, and others. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including Voices from the Fierce Intangible World (from South Florida Poetry Journal) and Endlessly Rocking: Poems in Honor of Walt Whitman's 200th Birthday (Unbound Content, Englewood, New Jersey). He studied acting at the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York, and he appeared in a couple of local (West Virginia/Ohio) independent movies. He received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. And he lives in the town where he was born-Parkersburg, West Virginia.
