POETIKZ @ the CROSSROADZ W/MARY ANN CAIN & GEORGE KALAMARAS

3402 Fairfield Avenue,Fort Wayne IN 46807

16 April, 2023

Description

POETIKZ @ the CROSSROADZ is space in the public square for the Poet to critically engage her community. Since last September, we've offered poets a forum to be heard & to listen. Beyond staging readings, we're providing opportunities for poiesis. Next up at the Crossroadz are two exceptional poets whose careers were teaching, encouraging, & giving students the critical tools & platforms to be heard. Mary Ann Cain & George Kalamaras are a wife & husband team that recently retired from the English Department at IPFW. Their presence in the public square is an opportunity for the community to engage these creatives, query their perspectives & probe their creative psyches. Mary Ann Cain’s fiction, nonfiction essays, and poems have appeared in national and international literary and scholarly journals. Her five books are similarly diverse in genre, including a poetry collection, How Small the Sky Really Dreams (Dos Madres Press, 2021), a biography, South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs (Northwestern University Press, 2018), a novel, Down from Moonshine (Thirteenth Moon Press, 2009), and two scholarly books, Composing Public Space: Teaching Writing in the Face of Private Interests (Heinemann 2010) and Revisioning Writers’ Talk: Gender and Culture in Acts of Composing (SUNY Press 1995). She is Professor Emerita of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne and lives with her husband, poet George Kalamaras, and their beloved beagle, Blaisie. They spend time living in both Fort Wayne and Livermore, Colorado George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014–2016), is the author of twenty-three books of poetry—fourteen full-length books and nine chapbooks. His most recent book is To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, a 300-page tribute to modern Greek poetry and to George’s Greek ancestors. He is currently completing a book of poems about his jazz heroes from the 1950s and 1960s—the golden age of Blue Note, Impulse, Prestige, and Verve recordings. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for thirty-two years. He lives with his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, and their adorable beagle, Blaisie. .