CRAIG CZURY - EXPANDED BIO
 

CRAIG CZURY has spent over 35 years developing, initiating, and directing public poetry projects in his native United States, as well as in many other countries abroad. He specializes in creating public infrastructures that enable the voices of the project participants to speak and to be heard. He is dedicated to making these experiences bi-lingual, including the cultural exchange of quality translations between English and other languages.

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Czury is a pioneer in a contemporary multi-voice poetry experience called, Poem Fusions, in which students create their own poetic voices, but then work under his direction in combining their voices into a group voice - a poetic choir, if you will. This is a transformative experience, one of gestalt, where from the combined voices creates a narrative and a poetic much larger and more inclusive than any of the single voices from which it was born.

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He has been awarded many national and international awards and fellowships to conduct these collaborative “Poem Fusion” performances and related poetry mural projects. From 1995-96, he spent a year with AmeriCorps*WritersCorps in Washington, D.C., conducting poetry workshops with inmate-patients at St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital, fifty years after Ezra Pound was there. In 1999, through an Americans For The Arts artist exchange fellowship, Czury developed a BBC Radio series of poetry performances through the Derry Playhouse between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. From 1997-2000, he created a community documentary with poetry throughout Berks County with his National Endowment for the Arts-sponsored Berks Poetry Project, thanks to the Berks Arts Council.  From 2010-2012, Czury was the Poet Laureate of Berks County, Pennsylvania, where he lived and made poetry happen for over 20 years.

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Among his many other projects through the years, in 2012 Czury was awarded the F. Lammot Belin Scholarship for Artists, for his “fracking” poetry documentary, which allowed him to piece together his “Thumb Notes”—interviews collected while hitchhiking Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Rt. 29 between Tunkhannock and Montrose—into a long poem that chronicles the voices of the residents, land owners and workers in Pennsylvania’s natural gas drilling region. He was also awarded a 2013

Berks County Arts Council grant to create a poetry/hip hop poetry performance, with Noah Ayala, with children and adults of Opportunity House in Reading.

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In the two plus decades that he lived in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Czury created poetry and poetry performances in schools, GoggleWorks, Olivet’s/PAL, Kids Cafes, Reading Emergency Shelter & Learning Center, Juvenile Detention Center, YMCA, Wernersville State Hospital, senior citizen centers and various other educational programs throughout Berks County. For years he organized a "Noche de Poesía" poetry vaudeville at the Puerto Rican Latin Association in Reading.

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Craig Czury is a creator of poetry and poetry performances, a university lecturer, an author and publisher, an editor and translator, and an arts advocate who energizes communities and organizations through public poetry. Czury’s early adulthood was spent hitchhiking North America, working carnivals, warehouses, canneries, construction crews, restaurant kitchens, and organizing community poetry readings. It is from his childhood growing up in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, from his experiences during 15 years of hitchhiking, and from his continued travels all over the world that Czury’s indomitable spirit springs colorfully forth into his poetry.

Czury currently teaches, writes, and plays harmonica in both Europe and the U.S. 

www.craigczury.com

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