John Paul Davis

My name is John Paul Davis. I'm a poet, musician and programmer. My poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies; you can see a partial list of publications on the Poetry page. My first collection of poetry, Crown Prince Of Rabbits, was published by Great Weather For Media in 2017. My second, Climbing A Burning Rope, was published by University Of Pittsburgh Press in 2024. I've worked as a songwriter, composer, lyricist, session musician and producer for my bands, Love In The Ruins and Day Of The Mountain, and for other musicians. I've been a front-end web developer for the past 25 years, first as a freelancer and then for various digital agencies. Currently, I'm Deputy Director of Web Development for Blue State, where I help build web products for progressive nonprofits and politicians. Along the way I've done web work for clients as diverse as The Obama Foundation, Elizabeth Warren, UN Women, The Sierra Club, Teach For America, Mercedes, Uniqlo, and many others. I'm a father and have been married to the wonderful Mahira Kakkar since 2016. I live in New York City, where I've been for fifteen years. I've also lived in Chicago, San Francisco. Washington, D.C., North Carolina, and Yellow Spings, Ohio.

Current Publication Bio: John Paul Davis is a poet, musician and programmer. His most recent book is Climbing A Burning Rope, published by University of Pittsburgh Press. His first, 'Crown Prince Of Rabbits,' was published in 2017 by Great Weather For Media. His poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals. He makes music with the bands Love In The Ruins and Day Of The Mountain. He lives with his wife, actress Mahira Kakkar, in New York City. You can find our more about him at www.johnpauldavis.org

This is the sixteenth version of this site. The first was launched in 1998. This version of the site reflects not only my current visual aesthetic but also my current ethics and politics. Those include concerns around the proliferation of the bullshit web and its negative effects on the digital commons, political discourse, and climate change, as well as a desire to increase accessibility. To that end, this site does not use front-end Javascript, nor does its user-facing code employ any kind of tracking, cookies or third-party scripts, iframes or other includes that might increase page weight or invade my readers' privacy. All functional behavior is either default browser behavior or it is executed on the server. In an effort to reduce page weight, images appear only as they are necessary to the page content, so absent are screen-filling photographs. Furthermore, since fonts weigh a lot, and since fonts served by third parties can also be used to collect data, this site uses the user's default system font for sans-serif fonts, and Athelas, with fallbacks to Constantia, then Georgia, for the serif font stack; as of 2020, Athelas is incluced most modern operating systems. The result should be a site that is lightweight and accessible. You can read more detail about how I came to decide on this refactor here.