Born in Chicago and grew up in Cedar Lake, Indiana, in Lake County, George Kalamaras was selected as the new Indiana State Poet Laureate. Since 1990, he has been a professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He earned his Doctorate in English from State University of New York at Albany and over the years has published six books of poetry and one of scholarship, including numerous articles in scholarly journals; and more than 725 poems in anthologies and magazines in the U.S and abroad.
“I am deeply honored with this appointment and absolutely thrilled to serve the people and state of Indiana in this way,” Kalamaras said. “The vocation of poetry is not about individual accolades, although I am humbled and most pleased with this honor. However, I see poetry as an act of loving service – to people, to animals and the planet, and to the culture at large. Poetry grants us the opportunity to practice a meaning-making activity in which the smaller sense of self eventually dissolves into a more expansive Self with a larger sense of purpose beyond the individual. I look forward to serving as Poet Laureate and am grateful beyond words for the faith the Indiana Arts Commission has already shown in me.”
In 1994, Kalamaras received an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship to conduct research in India, with joint affiliations at Banaras Hindu University and Deccan College. In 1993, he received a Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has twice received an Individual Artist Fellowship Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. In 2009, he won the Outstanding Researcher Award at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He has also presented numerous poetry readings throughout the United States as well as in India, and has served as a guest lecturer at universities in both countries.
Kalamaras will serve through December 31, 2015 and succeeds Karen Kovacik.