Norbert Krapf Releases New Poem Memoirs
Noted American poet and author Norbert Krapf, a professor of English at
the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, N.Y., has
published his sixteenth book, The Sunday Before Thanksgiving: Two Prose
Memoirs (Rain Crow Publishing, Chicago).
The book tells the story of the death of the author's uncle, Jerome,
who died in Germany near the end of World War II, and of the life and death
of his father, Clarence, a southern Indiana resident. Each of the memoirs
has ten sections.
According to a recent review: "In these two pieces of creative
nonfiction that are equal parts essay, story and arguably poetry, ... Krapf's
[work] has deep affinities with the local color tradition of American literature.
[His] forte is in recognizing the spiritual interaction between a people
and their place."
The new book is closely related in subject and theme to Krapf's two
previous poetry collections, Somewhere in Southern Indiana (1993) and Blue-Eyed
Grass: Poems of Germany (1997). Presently completing a sabbatical leave
of absence from Long Island University, Krapf is working on a prose memoir
about growing up in southern Indiana, The Ripest Moments. He has completed
the manuscript of a second collection of poems set in southern Indiana,
"The Horseradish Man & Other Poems."
Krapf grew up in the German community of Jasper, Indiana. He is the
editor/translator of Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia
and Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,
and editor of the revised and expanded Finding the Grain: Pioneer German
Journals and Letters from Dubois County, Indiana. His German heritage also
figures prominently in Somewhere in Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern
Origins, and Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany. A graduate of St. Joseph's
College (Indiana) and the University of Notre Dame, where he received his
Master's and Ph.D. in English and American Literature, he has served as
a U.S. Exchange Teacher at West Oxon Technical College, England, and as
senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg
and Erlangen/Nuremberg, Germany. He directs the C.W. Post Poetry Center
of C.W. Post and is a resident of Roslyn. The Sunday Before Thanksgiving
is available for $5 from the publisher, Rain Crow Publishing, 2127 W. Pierce
Ave., Apt. 2B, Chicago, IL 60622-1824.
For more information call the C.W. Post Public
Relations Office at (516) 299-2333 or e-mail cwpostpr@aurora.liunet.edu
or send mail to: Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus, 720 Northern
Blvd., Brookville, New York 11548-1300.
