Looking for God's Country - Softcover

Norbert Krapf grew up in Jasper, Indiana, a German community, and taught, from 1970 to 2004, at Long Island University, where he directed the C. W. Post Poetry Center for eighteen years. He now lives in Indianapolis. A graduate of St. Joseph's College (Rensselaer, Indiana), which awarded him an honorary doctorate, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Notre Dame. His poetry volumes include the trilogy Somewhere in Southern Indiana, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, and Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island, as well as the recent The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the editor of Finding the Grain, a collection of pioneer German journals and letters from his native Dubois County, and Under Open Sky, a gathering of writings, by contemporary American poets, on William Cullen Bryant. He is also the translator/editor of Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia. Winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he has been a U.S. Exchange Teacher at West Oxon Technical College, England, and Fulbright Professor of American Poetry at the Universities of Freiburg and Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

In half a lifetime of writing history and poetry about the...communities of the Jasper [Indiana] area and their German antecedents, Krapf has shown a sense of place and ethnic identity that radiates out to universal brotherhood....He reminds us of the all-American Walt Whitman, who remained "a part of all that I have met" and of Wendell Berry, who sings of his beloved Kentucky that he has seen the worst and best of humankind there. --Dan Carpenter, The Indianapolis Star

Norbert Krapf...has always spoken eloquently, but without pretension, of spirit and home in his poems. Looking for God's Country, which blends German memories with the American heartland, may be his best collection yet. --Joseph Bruchac, Native American poet, novelist, and storyteller, and founder and co-director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center