Biographical Sketch of David J. Keffer at the Poison Pie Publishing House.

David Keffer
portrait by Lu Yu (2022).

David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today, leading a computational research group interested in materials relevant to the pursuit of sustainable energy. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant and spent a year (2010-11) at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published critical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé in the Scriptorium of The Modern Word site. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available in paperback and ebook form from the Poison Pie Publishing House.

Beginning in 2012, David Keffer began teaching a course on the subject of non-idiomatic improvisational music, of which he is a dedicated listener and a topic which has led him on an investigation of a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation.

David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.