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 web developer for the past 27 years, first as a freelancer and then for various digital agencies. 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, Doctors Without Borders, The International Labor Organization, Mercedes, Uniqlo, Unilever, Ford, The Rockefeller Foundation, The 9/11 Memorial and Musuem, 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 seventeenth version of this site. The first was launched in 1998. This version of the site reflects not only my current visual aesthetic but also a desire to increase accessibility & reduce page weight. 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 included most modern operating systems.
This site (once again) runs on WordPress. Previous versions were: hand-coded HTML (1998-2002), Moveable Type (2002-2006), WordPress (2006-2017), and Grav (2017-2025). I returned to WordPress because I have plans for future versions of this site that Grav, which I still like very much, either does not support or (this is more often the issue) my knowledge of WordPress far surpasses my knowledge of Grav, and I want to be able to write the code for that new functionality myself.
The WordPress theme is hand-coded. I use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to create and manage custom fields, the Timber extension to enable the use of Twig templating, SASS as a CSS compiler (though now the most browsers support CSS nesting, I plan to migrate away from dependence on SASS). And again, as much as I enjoy writing it, no JavaScript.
This site also shares content with my newsletter, which is managed and distributed using PHPList. Newsletter posts are cross-posted to the WordPress site. The result should be a site that is lightweight and accessible.