Norbert Krapf was born in 1943 in Jasper, Indiana, a German community, and 1970-2004 he taught English at Long Island University, where he directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center.
His German roots publications include the poetry collections Somewhere in Southern Indiana, Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany, and The Country I Come From, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Forthcoming in 2005 is Looking for God's Country, which includes twenty-six poems inspired by the work of Franconian photographer Andreas Riedel, a selection of which appear on this website. Krapf is the editor/translator of Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia and Shadows on the Sundial: Legends from Franconia and the editor of Finding the Grain, a collection of German immigrant journals and letters from southern Indiana.
Winner of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he was a Fulbright professor of American poetry at the Universities of Freiburg (1980-81) and Erlangen-Nuremberg (1988-89). For more information see his website: www.krapfpoetry.com.
Andreas Riedel was born in 1970 in Neutstadt. a. d. Aisch, in Franconia. He was an apprentice in a photography studio 1987-1990, in 1994 he passed his examination as a master photographer, and since 1993 he has worked as a free-lance photographer in his own studio. In 1997 he received two Kodak European Portrait awards. The black and white photos that inspired twenty-six of the poems in Norbert Krapf's Looking for God's Country were originally published in Andreas Riedel's Die sedd'n un' die selln (1997). He collaborated with Franconian dialect poet Helmut Haberkamm in Lichd ab vom Schuss and Des sichd eich gleich. For further information and samples of his work, see www.fotografie-riedel.de.
