About the playwright:

Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate, is the author of twelve poetry collections, including Catholic Boy Blues: A Poet’s Journal  and the recent The Return of Sunshine, about his Colombian-German-American grandson, age four, as well as the prose memoir Shrinking the Monster: Healing the Wounds of Our Abuse.

A native of Jasper, Indiana, a German-Catholic town, he taught English for 34 years at Long Island University and directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center for 18 years. He released a poetry and jazz cd with pianist-composer Monika Herzig, Imagine, and collaborates with bluesman Gordon Bonham. He won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glick Indiana Author Award, and received a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis to combine poetry and the blues. His poems were read on the Writers Almanac and included on IndyGo buses.  Norbert’s poem  “Back in Indiana” was part of the play Finding Home: Indiana at 200 at the Indiana Repertory Theatre and is included in a stained-glass window at the Indianapolis International Airport.

Norbert began work on his play adaptation of Catholic Boy Blues in October, 2006  As soon as I wrote the poems I knew CBB should also become a play because it was composed of voices speaking. I felt like I was being fulfilled and what I had to say would reach a different and wider audience in the play. To complete my first play at 75 was a great breakthrough! A liberation!