April is National Poetry Month
Just like last year, let’s turn this into Greek-American Poetry Month! So, without further ago, meet some more Greek-American poets.
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Aliki Barnstone
Aliki Barnstone is an American poet, translator, critic, editor, and visual artist of Greek and Jewish ancestry. She is the author of eight poetry collections, including Eva: Voices of an Imaginary Poet (Vakhikon Editions, 2023); Dwelling (Sheep Meadow Press, 2016); and Bright Body (White Pine Press, 2011). Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower: Poems about the World at Nine (Crowell-Collier, 1968) was introduced by Anne Sexton and was published when she was twelve. She is the translator of Portrait Before Dark by Liana Sakelliou (St. Julian Press, 2022); and The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006).
Barnstone has received multiple awards and fellowships, including fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Anderson Center for the Peforming Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A retired professor of English and creative writing at the University of Missouri, Barnstone was the state poet laureate of Missouri from 2016 to 2019.
George Kalamaras
George Kalamaras is a Greek-American poet & retired educator. From 2014-2016, he was Poet Laureate of Indiana. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he taught for 32 years. Kalamaras has published 27 volumes of poetry, including 18 full-length books. To Sleep in the Horse’s Belly: My Greek Poets and the Aegean Inside Me (Dos Madres Press, 2023), is a deeply personal volume, a chronicle of his Greek ancestry–literary, artistic, and familial. It won the Indiana Book Award in Poetry in 2024.
Other works include The Rain That Doesn’t Reach the Ground (Dos Madres Press, 2025), We Slept the Animal (Does Madres Press, 2021), and Luminous in the Owl’s Rib (Dos Madres Press, 2019). He is recipient of various national and state prizes for his poetry and spent several months in India in 1994 on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship. In addition to his publications in the U.S., his poems have appeared in print journals in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America and have been translated into Bengali and Spanish.
Penelope Karageorge
Penelope Karageorge is a poet and novelist, a former journalist, and former publicity director for People magazine. Years ago, when New York City announced a contest for New York City poets celebrating the city, she wrote “New York Love Letter, P.S. You’re Crazy.” It took third prize out of thousands of contestants. Over the years, she’s received multiple accolades for her work. Karageorge has stated that she culls inspiration from many sources, including the Goddess Circe, actress Bette Davis, Las Vegas neon, Aegean moonlight, the world of work, and Dionysian desire.
Her poetry works include The Neon Suitcase (Somerset Hall Press, 2015) and Red Lipstick and The Wine-Dark Sea (Pella Pub Co, 1997). The works in The Neon Suitcase were inspired by New York, Greece, popular culture, and the arts. Many of the poems were written in Karageorge’s stone house on the Greek island of Lemnos.
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Stephanos Papadopoulos
Stephanos Papadopoulos was born in North Carolina and raised in Paris and Athens. In 1998 he was invited to the Rat Island Foundation’s inaugural event in St. Lucia by Derek Walcott, beginning a long association with the poet. He is the author of three books of poetry: Lost Days (Leviathan, 2001), The Black Sea (Sheep Meadow Press, 2012), and Hôtel-Dieu (Sheep Meadow Press, 2009). The Black Sea is a long poem-cycle about the Black Sea Greeks and their exodus from that region. It explores the historic “great catastrophe” of the Pontic Greeks of Asia Minor in the 1920s through a series of “sonnet-monologues” or voices from the past. Priests, prostitutes, soldiers, and a bizarre cast of characters move through this poetic re-imagining of a tragic chapter in Greece’s history.
Papadopoulos is also the editor and co-translator with Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke of Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems into Greek (Kastaniotis Editions, 2006). He’s also translated works of Greek poets, including Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiannis Ritsos, and Kostas Karyotakis. Anghelaki-Rooke has translated Papadopoulos’ work into Greek. His work has also been translated into Italian and Spanish. In 2014, he was awarded the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize selected by Mark Strand. His poems and translations have appeared in journals such as The New Republic, The Yale Review, Poetry Review, and Stand Magazine. He’s a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Hilary Sideris
Hilary Sideris, American poet of Greek and Irish ancestry, is based in Brooklyn. She studied English literature at Indiana University and earned her MFA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently works as a professional developer for the CUNY Start program at The City University of New York. Sideris culls the depths of all of her cultures to inform her work.
Her poems have appeared in multiple journals, including The American Journal of Poetry, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, The Southern Poetry Review, and other. Her work has also been published in several anthologies, including Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, edited by Dean Kostos (Somerset Hall Press, 2008). She has also published nine poetry collections, including Calliope (Broadstone Books, 2024), Liberty Laundry (Dos Madres Press, 2022), and Animal in English (Dos Madres Press, 2020); plus five poetry chapbooks.
National Poetry Month goes Greek-American
Hope you enjoyed learning about more Greek-American poets. Now you have lots more poetry to explore. Happy Greek-American Poetry Month!
Read more:
National Poetry Month — 10 Greek-American Poets (April 2025)
NEO MAGAZINE: Column: Mnemosyni’s Musings /NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: Meet Some Contemporary Greek Poets (April 2023)
