Norbert Krapf, a native of Jasper, Indiana, is a former Indiana Poet Laureate. For thirty-four years, he taught at Long Island University while directing the C.W. Post Poetry Center for eighteen of those years. In 2004, he retired and moved with his family to Indianapolis. He taught American poetry as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Freiburg (1980-81) and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (1988-89). His previous books include fourteen poetry collections such as Somewhere in Southern Indiana (1993), Looking for God's Country (2005), Bloodroot: Indiana Poems (2008), Sweet Sister Moon (2009), Songs in Sepia and Black and White (2012), Catholic Boy Blues (2015), Indiana Hill Country Poems (2019), and Southwest by Midwest (2020). Garrison Keillor has read his poems on The Writer's Almanac, and he has a poem in stained glass at the Indianapolis International Airport.Krapf is the author of four volumes of prose memoirs: The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood (2008), the experimental American Dreams: Reveries and Revisitations (2013), Shrinking the Monster: Healing the Wounds of Our Abuse (2016), and the forthcoming Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir (2023), which covers the fifty years of his writing and publishing life. He has collaborated with Indiana photographers Darryl Jones, David Pierini, and Richard Fields, and German photographer Andreas Riedel. With pianist-composer Monika Herzig, he released the jazz and poetry CD Imagine (2017), and he performs poetry and blues with Indiana bluesman Gordon Bonham. He has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, and a Glick Indiana Author Award. It is no stretch for him to move from listening to Delta Blues to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
