Former poet laureate to join Trine reading

Former Indiana Poet Laureate George Kalamaras will join a poetry reading hosted by Trine University from 3-4 p.m. Monday, April 17, in Best Hall 229.

Kalamaras will participate via Zoom, reading poetry about hound dogs, while Trine faculty and students will read in person.

The event is free and open to the public.

Kalamaras is professor emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for 32 years. He is the author of 23 collections of poetry — 14 full-length books and nine chapbooks — as well as a critical study on Western language theory and the Eastern wisdom traditions, “Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence” (State University of New York Press, 1994).

He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission (2001 and 2011). During 1994, he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship.

In addition to his publications in the United States, his poems have appeared in print journals in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, and have been translated into Bengali and Spanish. George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have nurtured beagles in their home for nearly 30 years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie.

For the last nine years, Kalamaras has written poems about hounds. These poems have appeared in some of the leading journals in the United States, among them AGNI, American Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters, North American Review and Western Humanities Review.

Kalamaras, Cain and Blaisie divide their time between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Livermore, Colorado, in the mountains north of Fort Collins.