Steven Knepper

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Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. He grew up on a small farm in Pennsylvania, and he still enjoys tending a garden. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond. His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in a number of journals.

Recent Essays

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.