It’s National Poetry Month! We are excited to host a special reading sponsored by PEN America, featuring former Indiana Poets Laurete: Norbert Krapf, Karen Kovacik, and Shari Wagner. Poets will read their work from the anthology, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, recently released by Michigan State University Press.
The program will also feature several guest appearances by other local writers sharing poems from the anthology. Copies of the book will be available for sale, from Irvington Vinyl & Books, and poets will be available to sign the book.
This event takes place on Saturday, April 20th, at 7 p.m., at the Circle City Industrial Complex, in the Schwitzer Gallery on the second floor. It is free and open to the public.
About the Poets Laureate:
Norbert Krapf is the author of twelve poetry collections, the most recent being The Return of Sunshine and Catholic Boy Blues, which he has adapted into a play being performed at IndyFringe in June. He collaborates with jazz pianist Monika Herzig and bluesman Gordon Bonham.
Karen Kovacik is a poet and translator. She’s the author of the poetry collections Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain; the editor of Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets; and the translator, most recently, of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture, a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has been awarded two NEA fellowships and a Fulbright research grant for her translations. Kovacik is professor of English at IUPUI.
Shari Wagner is the author of three books of poems: The Farm Wife’s Almanac (forthcoming this summer), The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana, and Evening Chore. Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Shenandoah, The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry. She has an MFA from Indiana University and teaches for the Indiana Writers Center, IUPUI’s Religion, Spirituality and the Arts Initiative, and, starting next Fall, the Theopoetics program of Bethany Theological Seminary on the Earlham campus in Richmond, Indiana.
