About The Author
Curtis L. Crisler was born and raised in Gary, Indiana. He received a BA in English, with a minor in Theatre, from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW, now PFW), and he received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Crisler’s (and Kevin McKelvey’s) poetry book Indiana Nocturnes: Our Rural and Urban Patchwork, was published by Nebo Publishing (with front and back cover art by Genna Pianki). Other poetry books are THe GReY aLBuM [PoeMS], winner of a Steel Toe Books Open Reading Period Prize (Steel Toe Books); Don’t Moan So Much (Stevie): A Poetry Musiquarium (Kattywompus Press);“This” Ameri-can-ah (Cherry Castle Publishing, with artwork by Melissa Vandenberg); Pulling Scabs, nominated for a Pushcart (Aquarius Press, with cover art by Curt Bailey). His YA books are Tough Boy Sonatas (Wordsong: an imprint of Boyd’s Mills Press, Inc.: a Highlights Company, with cover art and illustrations by Floyd Cooper), and Dreamist: a mixed-genre novel (Jordan’s Rainbow YA Book: a Division of Aquarius Press). His poetry chapbooks are Black Achilles (Accents Publishing); Wonderkind, nominated for a Pushcart (Aquarius Press); Soundtrack to Latchkey Boy (Finishing Line Press, with cover art by Crisler); Spill, won a Keyhole Chapbook Award (Keyhole Press); and Burnt Offering of a City, won the Kathy Young Chapbook Award (cover art by Curt Bailey and interior graphic art by Galen Bailey).
Crisler’s awarded fellowships and residencies come from the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh (COA/P), Cave Canem (Fellow), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Soul Mountain (Connecticut), a guest resident at Hamline University (Minnesota), a guest resident at Words on the Go (Indiana), and Writer-in-Residence (Writers @ The Carr Program) sponsored by Poets & Writers, INC (Michigan). Crisler’s awarded grants and awards come from a Library Scholars Grant Award, a RHINO Founder’s Award, Indiana Arts Commission Grants, Eric Hoffer Awards, the Sterling Plumpp First Voices Poetry Award, and he was nominated for the Eliot Rosewater Award and a Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award.
Crisler’s poetry has been adapted to theatrical productions in New York and Chicago, and he’s been anthologized in Black Fire This Time, Volume 1, Black in the Middle; An Indiana Christmas; Bop, Strut, and Dance: A Post Blues Form for New Generations; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry; Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghosts, Ghouls, and More; The Golden Shovel Anthology; Resist Much Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance; Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers; Drawn to Marvel: Poems From the Comic Books; An Anthology of Chicago Poetry: City of the Big Shoulders; Say it Loud: Poems about James Brown; Our Common Suffering: Anthology of Poets in Memoriam 2008 Sichuan Earthquake; The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South: A Cave Canem Anthology; In the Eye: A Collection of Writings; Fingernails Across a Chalkboard: Anthology: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora; Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade; Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami; Dare To Dream…Change The World; and Essence. He’s been published in a variety of magazines and journals. He was commissioned for William Morris (a glass artist) by the Fort Wayne Museum of Art (FWMoA). He’s been a Contributing Poetry Editor for Aquarius Press and a Poetry Editor for Human Equity through Art (HEArt).
Crisler’s work exhibits what he calls an urban Midwestern sensibility (uMs). What uMs exemplifies is “the community and creativity of the varied relationships of descendants from the first through second waves of the southern migration, exploring their connections to place/environment, history, family, and self.” Also, he created the poetry form the sonastic and the Indiana Chitlin Circuit (a small circuit bringing writers to Ft. Wayne). Crisler is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne. Contact him for readings, workshops, presentations, lectures, etc. at poetcrisler.com.
Publications
Doing Drive-Bys On How To Find Love In The Midwest
About Doing Drive-Bys On How To Find Love In The Midwest
About Doing Drive-Bys On How To Find Love In The Midwest
“The best writers are those who inspire me to write like they do. Whitman affected me this way, and Dickinson did, and so did T.S. Eliot. Reading Curtis L. Crisler’s Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest, I want to make his wild one-of-a-kind poetic voice my own, and I want to write about what he writes about, the world that needs to be written about, the world ignored by too many people, the world of brutality against the good people deprived of justice and love.”
—John Guzlowski, author of Echoes of Tattered Tongues
“If you’ve ever wondered what it means to be a poet writing in the Midwest, wonder and wander no longer. Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest is about loving, losing, and honoring the moments of life we do have. Curtis L. Crisler writes with an “urban Midwestern sensibility,” that takes us in and out of April snow, an IHOP, the white and black of Indiana. Even more than that, this poet, in poems that move with breath and jazz across the page, asks us to consider what it means to be human, to really be human, when Black lives are being lost at an alarming rate, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Emmitt Till, when a global pandemic swallows us whole, when death comes too soon. In “Fifty Something Years of Letters Laters,” the poet imagines a world where Emmett Till had lived and says: If she would not have lied / it’s also possible I would not be thankful. Here we should stand up and clap for the wisdom of this aging speaker—his perspective on this life, now, in this place, holds us accountable to find all the ‘beautiful things’ that will break our hearts.”
—Sarah Sandman, author of The Sinew of 47 Years and I Speak Moan
“Listen: If you manage to put down Curtis L. Crisler’s Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest for even a minute—and I don’t believe you can—you had best bury that sucker under a collected Shakespeare or a ten-pound anvil. Otherwise, this man’s poems are liable to jump right up off the page and dance, so infused are they with righteous rhythms. But the moves aren’t just for show. Crisler is after the heart and the hurt inside the contemporary experience. And so, he puts capital-R “Reality” on direct notice: there is some serious shit going on here we need to discuss.”
—Justin Hamm, author of Drinking Guinness With the Dead
“All the feels I’ve ever felt about what it means to live and love and lay claim to the Midwest are expressed in Curtis L. Crisler’s poetry. This is what it is to be seen. From the laments for George and Breonna and all the others we have never known, to the contemplation of corporeal and material ruin, to the excavation of passions dug down deep—all is laid bare here. Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest is not just another addition to a stunning oeuvre. It is a message, a critical intervention, a rapturous ode to a way of being.”
—Terrion L. Williamson, Director, Black Midwest Initiative, & Associate Professor, Black Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies
Wonderkind
Dreamist
Pulling Scabs
Tough Boy Sonatas