Raised in Concord, North Carolina (United States), and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, David is currently the Director of the Office for International Students and Scholars at New York University in New York City, where he is also an Associate Professor of International Education in the NYU Steinhardt School (adjunct).

David studied English Literature at the bachelors and masters levels at UNC where he also completed his Ph.D. in Higher Education, focusing on International Education (his dissertation, The Birds in the Rich Forest, having focused on Chinese students in the United States).

David has over twenty years of executive leadership experience in the field of International Education. In 1992, he was a Fulbright grantee in Japan. The love of poetry grows from deep roots, and in David’s case from his parents: his mother who sent poetry, sacred and secular, to him all through college with her letters, and his father who read Shakespeare and Coleridge to him as a child. David is a musician, and he lives in Summit, New Jersey with his college sweetheart, Amanda. The Austell’s have two daughters.