Poetry
George Kalamaras
A longtime Indiana resident, George Kalamaras was born on Chicago’s South Side. Three of his four grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Greece and settled in the Chicago area. George moved to northwest Indiana with his family in 1960 and grew up in the woods in Cedar Lake. After graduating from Indiana University Bloomington, he and his soon-to-be wife, Mary Ann Cain (a fellow student and Chicago original), left Indiana for ten years, first moving to Fort Collins, Colorado, where they attained their Masters degrees in English from Colorado State University, and then to Albany, New York, where they attained their doctoral degrees in English from State University of New York-Albany. Upon completion of that work, they returned to Indiana in 1990 to assume professorial positions.
George served as Indiana’s Poet Laureate during 2014 and 2015. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne (formerly Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne), where he taught for thirty-two years, retiring in 2022. He is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry—fifteen full-length books and nine chapbooks—and he has three additional full-length collections forthcoming in 2025 and 2026.
He has published numerous poems in some of the nation’s leading journals and anthologies, including AGNI, The Best American Poetry, The Bitter Oleander, Caliban, Conjunctions (online), The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review (online), New Letters, North American Review, Poetry (Chicago), Sulfur, and many others. 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 has also published a critical book on Western language theory and the Eastern wisdom traditions, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence, as well as numerous scholarly articles. He has received several grants and awards, including an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (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 from the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture.
Having grown up in the Indiana woods, one of George’s greatest loves is hound dogs! George and his wife, Mary Ann Cain (Professor Emerita at Purdue University Fort Wayne and a fellow writer) have nurtured beagles in their home for nearly thirty years, first Barney, then Bootsie, and now Blaisie.
2024 Poetry Winner: To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me
Twenty-five years in the making, with some poems dating as far back as forty years, To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me, is George Kalamaras’s chronicle of his Greek ancestry—literary, artistic, and familial. This book retells the lives of some of Kalamaras’s favorite Greek poets and artists, most often with his characteristic Surrealist outpouring and accretion of imagery, interlacing his inquiry with myth and the metaphor of the infamous Trojan Horse.
