We’re celebrating National Poetry Month by highlighting a different Hoosier poet each day in April. Learn about Indiana authors and follow links to their work below.
DAY 1 // MAtthew Graham
Matthew Graham is our newest (and current) Indiana Poet Laureate. He has lived in Southern Indiana for 35 years and recently retired from the University of Southern Indiana (USI), he has taught all levels of creative writing.
DAY 2 // Adrian Matejka
Adrian Matejka was the Indiana Poet Laureate in 2018-2019. His book The Big Smoke (2013), which focuses on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, was a finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, Map to the Stars, largely focuses on his childhood in Indianapolis.
DAY 3 // Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch came to Indiana in 1987, when she started Purdue University’s MFA program. She is the author of several collections of poetry that focus on specific, yet unexpected topics. Flight, medicine, grief and hitchhiking have all provided inspiration for Boruch’s works.
DAY 4 // Mitchell LH Douglas
Mitchell L. H. Douglas is the author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms, \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Persea Books Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award, and Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem, an NAACP Image Award and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee. He is an Associate Professor of English at IUPUI.
DAY 5 // Karen Kovacik
Karen Kovacik is a poet and translator who served as Indiana’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. She has earned a fellowship in literary translation from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland for her translations of contemporary Polish poetry.
DAY 6 // Eugene Gloria
Eugene Gloria lives in Greencastle, Indiana, where he teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw University. His work often explores the parameters of his dual cultural history as an Asian American.
DAY 7 // MANON VOICE
Manon Voice is a poet and spoken word artist based in Indianapolis. She is recipient of the 2020 Robert D. Beckmann Jr., Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and has performed all over Indianapolis and beyond. She seeks to use her art and activism to create a communal space where dialogue, transformation, discovery and inspiration can occur.
DAY 8 // Shari Wagner
Shari Wagner is the former Indiana Poet Laureate 2016-2017 and the author of three books of poems: The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana, Evening Chore, and The Farm Wife’s Almanac. She lives in Central Indiana and teaches poetry and memoir writing for the Indiana Writers Center and literature for Religion, Spirituality and the Arts , a program of the IUPUI Humanities and the Arts Institute.
DAY 9 // Orlando Menes
Orlando Ricardo Menes is the author of Memoria (2019); Heresies (2015); Fetish (2013), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize; and Furia (2005). He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
DAY 10 // Norbert Krapf
Norbert Krapf, emeritus prof. of English at Long Island Univ., moved back to Indiana from the New York area in 2004. Since then, he has served as Indiana’s State Poet Laureate and published five books. He is often inspired by music and his cultural heritage.