June 18 — Norbert Krapf shares “The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood”
Much of the creative career of poet Norbert Krapf has been exploring his family’s German roots .. with unexpected benefits for Indiana historians, the English language, German poetry, and our sense of Hoosier and American identity. All this from an Indiana-German community that Vonnegut thinks went into denial in 1917. Think how much creativity would be unleashed if we encourage our current newcomers to reimagine their roots.
When: Wednesday June 18, noon
Where: Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center, 450 West Ohio St. ∙ Indianapolis, IN 46202
In the 1840s and 1850s, thousands of German families left Europe for a new life in America. Hundreds of these immigrants eventually settled in the Dubois County community of Jasper, Indiana, the county seat. Surrounding the town were dense hardwood forests that provided the raw materials for craftsmen to begin the furniture-making firms for which the area became well known. Two of the German families that put down roots in the Jasper area, the Schmitts and the Krapfs, produced a son who today remembers those days of close ties to family and the land. The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood is a prose memoir by noted Indiana poet and essayist Norbert Krapf of his childhood in Jasper, Ind. Krapf, a Pulitzer Prize nominated poet, will discuss his small-town upbringing in Jasper’s German-Catholic community and will share the distinctive place and culture of the town. As Krapf observes, “Behind this book and my collections of poetry is a conviction that an awareness of individual and collective origins can enlighten, nourish, guide, and sustain us and those who come after us.”
Norbert Krapf was born in Jasper, Indiana, and received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Joseph’s College. He took his master’s degree and doctorate in English from the University of Notre Dame and taught English at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University for thirty-four years. In 2004 he moved with his family to Indianapolis, where he completed The Ripest Moments. His seven poetry collections, in which his Indiana German heritage is central, include Somewhere in Southern Indiana, The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and the retrospective selection Bloodroot: Indiana Poems. He is also the editor of Finding the Grain, a collection of pioneer German journals and letters from Dubois County, and the editor/translator of a book of legends set in his ancestral Franconia, Beneath the Cherry Sapling. For more about Norbert Krapf, visit his website.
