Homecomings: A Writer's Memoir

“Whether teaching his German students to listen to Whitman’s poetry until they hear his ‘sweet, delicious, rocking whisper,’ or recording the ‘no-longer-alive radiance’ of the stars shining their blessing onto the home his parents built in Jasper, Indiana, Homecomings is the record of a poet, teacher, and critic meditating with deep love and profound insight into the writers, the places, and the questions that have shaped his work. Essential reading for anyone familiar with Krapf’s poetry, it is also a book for those interested in how a poem works and how an artist chooses and maintains a life-long passion for craft and for the truth that art reveals.” Susan Neville, author, The Town of Whispering Dolls: Stories

“Not since Theodore Roethke has any poet handled so successfully as Norbert Krapf the subject of youth and adolescence.” William Jay Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate

Paperback, 336 pages.  2023, The Indiana Historical Society Press.  By Norbert Krapf.

NORBERT KRAPF, Indiana poet laureate from 2008 to 2010, was born in 1943 in Jasper, Indiana, a German-Catholic town in southern Indiana. He received his bachelor of arts degree in English from Saint Joseph College in 1965 and his MA and PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. He taught at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, where he directed the C. W. Post Poetry Center. He has frequently contributed to Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History and has previously published a book with the Indiana Historical Society Press, The Ripest Moments, a memoir of his youth in Jasper.