[5] Kempf is the author of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022)[6] and two poetry collections: Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017) [7] and What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021).

[15] In The New York Times, Stephanie Burt celebrated how, in Late in the Empire of Men "long sentences and interwoven plots contrast the poet's confined early life in blue-collar Ohio with the measure of freedom he found on the West Coast," heralding the book's critique of "American, and Midwestern, bad faith.

"[S]wagger, dark wit, erotic melancholy, syntactic dexterity, and many laudable skills are on display in Empire," Tierney writes, "which successfully contribute to its tonal and thematic universe.

In our "identity-facing moment," Spaar argues, "Kempf steps with smarts, humor, a depth and breadth of historical knowledge, and a nimble imagination into the thick of the debate about the meaning of America, avoiding rancor, rage, or oversimplification.

"[27] And in The Civil War Monitor, Kent Gramm writes that "Kempf has written an excellent series of reflections," describing poems that are "cerebral, dense with literary and historical allusions, and riddled with ambiguity and irony.