Former Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, born in Jasper, Indiana in 1943, is the winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glick Indiana Author Award for his entire work, and a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis to combine poetry and the blues. He was a Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg and Erlangen Nuremberg in Germany and is emeritus Prof. of English at Long Island University, where he directed the CW Post Poetry Center for 18 years and taught for over 30 years.

Krapf is the author, editor, or translator of 30 books. The collection The Country I Come From (2002) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His Catholic Boy Blues: (2014) received an Alpha & Omega Religious Risk Award, and his prose memoir Shrinking the Monster: Healing the Wounds of Our Abuse (2016) won an Illumination Book Award and was a finalist for an INDIES Book Award. His fourteen poetry collections include Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, a selection from five previous collections plus 175 new poems, with photos by David Pierine; Somewhere in Southern Indiana (1993) Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany (1997), Invisible Presence (1996), a collaboration with photographer Darryl Jones; and Songs in Sepia and Black and White (2012), with photos by Richard Fields. His most recent collections are Indiana Hill Country poems (2019) and Southwest by Midwest (2020).His prose memoir The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood (2008) was a finalist for Best Book of Indiana.

Krapf’s German roots work includes translations of early poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Shadows on the Sundial (1990); a collection of legends set in his ancestral Franconia (northern Bavaria), Beneath the Cherry Sapling (1998), and Finding the Grain: Pioneer German Journals and Letters from Dubois County, Indiana (1996). For a complete list of his books click here

As Indiana Poet Laureate (2008-10), Krapf stressed collaborations and the reunion of poetry and song (music). He released a poetry and jazz CD with pianist-composer Monika Herzig, Imagine, and performs poetry and blues with bluesman Gordon Bonham.