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,Poetry London, and a variety of other places. 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 lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children and works as Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University. His poetry collection Holy the Body, published in March by Texas Review Press, was chosen as one of "2026's Most Anticipated Books" by Garden & Gun magazine.
Praise for Holy the Body:
[E]xquisitely funny and magically solemn . . . —MAJOR JACKSON, author of Razzle Dazzle
[S]pirited and tender . . . poems of deep humor and pathos. —PHILIP METRES, author of Fugitive/Refuge
[P]ortrays innocence alongside violence before a return to innocence through clear-sighted recollections. —PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA, author of Kitchen Hymns
McAbee’s portrait of an open-handed, non-judgmental, big tent Christianity will appeal to all who seek connection . . . —KATE DANIELS, author of In the Months of My Son’s Recovery
[G]ems of faith, emotion, and longing . . . an apophatic theology that speaks to the holes in our hearts . . . —ERIKA MEITNER, author of Useful Junk
Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee, and Jesus’s tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems explore the dynamics of loss, grief, and doubt, while chiseling out a hard- earned language for the sacred.
Poems
SELECTED LIST
2025 “Hanging Out with Jesus on a Sunny Day” and “Cumberland Koans,” Bad Lilies, Summer.
2024 “Dedication to Craft,” Poetry London, Autumn.
2023 “The Tunnel,” The Sun, October.
2023 “Holding On,” EcoTheo Review, August 4.
2022 “Desert Sayings,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
2022 “Kiwi Shoe Polish,” Notre Dame Review, No. 52.
2021 “Little God,” Five Points, 20.3, Fall.
2021 “One-Eyed Jesus of the Sacred Heart,” The Christian Century, 138.15.
2020 “Delirium,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, March 24.
2020 “Rupture,” JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, March 17.
2019 4 Poems, “Divine Reticence,” “Cigarettes and Diapers,” “Grit,” and “Animal
Espionage,” The Hudson Review, Autumn.
2019 “Visitation,” The Greensboro Review, Fall.
2019 “Holy the Body,” The Sun, July 2019.
2019 “Sightings,” The Sun, May 2019.
2017 "Breath," Five Points, 18.1, Spring.
2017 "Waffle House Love," The Inquisitive Eater
2017 "Corpus," The Christian Century, 134.7
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