A teacher, a scholar, an award-winning writer, Collins worked for forty years in the Department of English at Westminster College (Fulton, Missouri) where he taught courses on medieval and Renaissance literature, American Writers in Paris, and Creative Writing. He is the author of more than fifteen scholarly essays and the winner of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Dave’s creative work has appeared in The New Laurel Review, The Hawaii Review, The Chariton Review, Pleiades, Well Versed, Interpretations, Uncertain Promise, and It Happened in Callaway. Interviews with Diane Johnson and Jake Lamar were published in The AWP Chronicle and Belles Lettres. He has written for St. Louis Magazine, Leadership Magazine, The Quadrangle, Inside UNT Press, the Columbia Tribune and the Fulton Sun.

His first book-length work – Accidental Activists: Mark Phariss, Vic Holmes, and Their Fight for Marriage Equality in Texas – was published by the University of North Texas Press in August 2017. The previous year, the manuscript for Accidental Activists won the Mayborn Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. Three of Collins’s short essays have also won awards, two for first place, one for second. 

He has also worked as an editor of scholarly, creative, and business publications, most recently, a collection of short fiction and creative nonfiction for the Compass Flower Press.

Collins is working now on two long-term projects. The first is a novel, Shadows of Notre Dame, a literary mystery with two young lovers at its center – an aspiring jazz musician and an aspiring writer whose troubled pasts follow them to Paris. The second is a book-length series of walking tours of literary Paris tentatively titled Parisian Places, American Faces: Walks on the Left Bank with American Writers.