About

Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Sun Magazine (US), Garden & Gun, and a variety of other places. His poetry chapbook, Sightings, was released as part of the Floodgate Series, Vol 7. His academic monograph Charles Simic and the Poetics of Uncertainty was published in 2020. He grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He works as Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University, where he is currently Co-Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Grant: “‘Boundless Love’: Changing Ideas of the Sacred in Americana Music.” Donovan lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children. His poetry collection Holy the Body is set to be released by Texas Review Press in 2026.