Steven Knepper

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Steven Knepper is a contributing editor at Front Porch Republic. He grew up on a small farm in Pennsylvania, and he still enjoys tending a garden. He is currently Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. '81 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond and co-author of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction. He edits the online poetry journal New Verse Review.

Recent Essays

Hope Out of Despair: A Review of Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope

Steven Knepper - December 2, 2024

But I suspect that this stirring book will strike a chord with many readers of Front Porch Republic.

The Wild of God in Waterloo Township, Michigan

Steven Knepper - July 12, 2024

I found it to be profound and moving, the work of an author who is not lost in flights of fancy but who is deeply receptive to the world and its God.

Gadfly Graffiti

Steven Knepper - April 9, 2024

In a funk no more, I was prepared to meet the smile of my daughters with a genuine smile of my own as they came out of practice. The graffiti was gadfly, but also gift.

Small Plastic Gods: On the Tabletop Renaissance

Steven Knepper - January 5, 2024

Tabletop games put something in our twitchy, swipe-hungry fingers other than a digital device—a hand of cards, a pair of dice, a plastic Zeus. And since others have put down their phones too, we can look out over those cards into a human face, a present human face.

Paterson and Poetic Fidelity

Steven Knepper - December 2, 2022

Creative fidelity is attuned to, and draws out, the richness in people and things. It calls for awareness and attentive seeing. In the end, Paterson is a film about such creative fidelity to a place and its people.

Men in the Field: The Farming Stories of Leo L. Ward, C.S.C.

Steven Knepper - February 19, 2021

The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional intricacies.

Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies

Steven Knepper - December 2, 2020

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope that keeps open a sense of possibility—that shines obscurely beneath their grief.