,
Mo.— BkMk Press proudly announces publication of Prayer Against Famine
and Other Irish Poems by John Knoepfle. “I have written this book in an
attempt to regain a lost heritage,” said Knoepfle. “My mother’s Irish
family—Brickleys and McCarthys—was all gone by the year I was born. All
grandparents, all uncles, all aunts, all gone. And my mother would never
speak of her childhood on New York’s Lower East Side. She had suffered too
many losses there.”
But Knoepfle’s search to comprehend the depths of his
ancestors losses leads him also to a more universal understanding: “In terms
of Ireland and America, what I was looking for when I began that book was my
Irish family. What I found, in a mass grave in Skibbereen in County Cork,
was the famine – An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger. I began to
understand that the events that sent some members of my family to the United
States as immigrants and probably put others in that mass grave in Cork are
pretty much the same things that we all worry about today: hunger, poverty,
injustice, war, the silencing of peoples and their cultures.”
“These are poems of faith that take into account the
real world and make us see it anew,” writes Kathleen Norris, author of
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Virgin of Bennington, in
her advance praise for the book. “John Knoepfle transforms a search for his
Irish roots into a meditation on human suffering and survival.”
John Knoepfle is the author or editor of over a dozen
books. He is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Springfield.
His awards include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Mark Twain Award for
Contributions to Midwestern Literature. He lives in Springfield, Illinois,
with his wife, Peggy Sower Knoepfle.
BkMk Press was founded in 1971 and became a part of UMKC in 1983. The
press publishes fine literature by contemporary authors. Financial
assistance for BkMk Press is provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state
agency, by UMKC, and by private donations. Media review copies of Prayer
Against Famine can be obtained by contacting BkMk Press at (816)
235-2558.*
The University of Missouri-Kansas City, established in 1963, has the
following strategic goals: In 2006: We are a national leader in scholarship
and creative activity; We attract, nurture, and develop responsible
community leaders; We are an essential community partner and resource; We
are a workplace of choice; and We have the resources to fuel our vision.
* Individuals with speech or hearing impairments may call Relay Missouri
at (800) 735-2966 (TT) or (800) 735-2466 (voice).
