Dr. Christian Knoeller Dr. Christian Knoeller, an award-winning poet and Associate Professor of English Education at Purdue University, will speak at the Flora-Monroe Public Library on April 6 at 7 p.m.

The library is hosting "An Evening with Christian Knoeller" as part of National Library Week and National Poetry Month.

Knoeller will give a reading and a presentation on poetry.

He previously taught high school and college English in Alaska, California, Oregon, and Wisconsin, and now makes his home in a Victorian farmstead on Deer Creek in Carroll County.

Over the past 20 years, Knoeller's poems have appeared in many national journals including Cutbank, Greenfield Review, GW Review, Southern Poetry Review, Visions International, and West Branch Quarterly.

Devil's Club Press of Juneau, Alaska, published his chapbook, "Song in Brown Bear Country."

He has been a finalist in several national book competitions, including the National Poetry Series. His first collection, "Completing the Circle," published by Buttonwood Press (2000), was awarded the Millennium Prize, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

As a scholar, Dr. Knoeller studies and writes about English teaching. His book "Voicing Ourselves: Whose Words We Use When We Talk About Books," a study of student led discussions of literature in a diverse, Bay Area, Advanced Placement classroom, was published in 1998 by the State University of New York Press.

His current research interests in English education include "Imaginative Response," teaching literature through creative writing. His most recent international publications address teaching contemporary Native American writers including "Engaging indigenous voices in the classroom" in English Quarterly from the Canadian Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, and "Recognizing Indigenous Voices: Contemporary Multigenre Works by Native American Authors" in English in Australia from the Australian Association for the Teaching of English.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Knoeller has traveled extensively in Southern Mexico, Central America, Japan, Canada and Alaska.

Upon completing a degree at Bucknell University in 1976 where he was awarded the Alice J. Russo Memorial Prize for Poetry he crossed North America by bicycle and settled on the West Coast, where he began teaching in a private, alternative high school. He subsequently attended the University of Oregon, where he taught international students enrolled at the school's American English Institute and received master's degrees in both creative writing and linguistics.

Relocating in Alaska, Knoeller worked in a variety of educational capacities: teaching ESL to adult immigrants in ABE programs, serving as an advisory teacher for the state's correspondence study program, preparing adult literacy tutors and trainers, and writing K-12 curriculum descriptions for public school districts. He also earned Alaska secondary teaching certification, as well as offering college courses in contemporary Native American literature. After six years there, he returned to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in language and literacy.