CRAIG CZURY
40 Years of Creating Public Poetry Experiences
(because Poetry is not a Spectator Sport)
BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS
Craig's poems were born in the Anthracite Coal region of his youth, hitchhiked across North America for 15 years, and eventually wrote themselves around the world.
His unique voice, invigorated by a lifetime studying world poets, carries his poetry into the artistic realm between surrealism and documentary.
An award-winning poet of 20 collections, Craig's works have been translated into Albanian, Arabic, Croatian, Italian, Lithu-anian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. ​​
Craig is also an editor and translator of a number of collections and publications.
JUST PUBLISHED: September 2025
And If You Saw Me: Prose Poems and Poems
Moonstone Press, Philadelphia​
AN INTERNATIONAL
TEACHING ARTIST
A Fulbright Scholar to Chile in 2022, Craig has been a respected Poet in Residence across the US, as well as in Europe and South America.
From the 1980's to the present day, his work with organizations like The National Endowment on the Arts, AmeriCorps WritersCorp, Americans for The Arts, The Ford Foundation, The Dodge Foundation, Very Special Arts, and more - as well as dozens of state and international arts councils - have sent him to serve children and adults in schools, universities, homeless shelters, prisons, and innumerable community programs around the world.
INNOVATIVE CULTURE WORKER
AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZER
Making public poetry happen in places where people don't expect to find poetry has been Craig's lifetime mission. For over 40 years, he's worked within myriad communities and cultural groups to help them access and develop both their own inner voices as well as their larger communal voice.
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His signature experience is what he coined "Poem Fusions" - a perfected series of writing exercises followed by the inexplicable magic of bringing the individual voices of all participants into a poignant mosaic - their collective experiences singing together on the page as one communal voice.
KEYNOTE LECTURER
AND FEATURED POET
An award-winning poet, Craig has been a featured reader and invited guest at poetry and literature festivals across The Americas, Europe, and Asia for decades. Through his words and his work, he develops cultural bridges which draw people closer to one another through shared human experiences.
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His energetic leadership in collaborative, international public poetry projects and translations of poetry into other languages have allowed people of various nations and cultures to more deeply understand and empathize one another.
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"We turn to poetry in an attempt to resolve an unresolved grief..."
POET. EDUCATOR. CULTURAL WORKER.
A way with words,
a way with people
A former poetry consultant for The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Pennsylvania Governors School, among many others, Craig's longevity in education spans four decades, making him a perfect fit to guide schools into success with arts education program strategies.
Whether working directly with curriculum development teams, teacher education programs, or even through keynote presentations, Craig provides invaluable and measurable improvement in your students' language arts performance.
He also works as an editor/editing consultant, both in the US and internationally.
I want to create a poem that blurs memory, the way memory has no chronology, no compartments. I want the page written as a map with its punctuation a metronome for surfacing past events. Spacial, not linear. Voices in a crowded room or conversations through phone lines, time lines. A chimed thought echoing through an island of goodbyes...
~ Craig Czury
CLASSES / WORKSHOPS / ONE-ON-ONE
Elevate Your
Writing Into Art
Get out of your head and into that soul space where our deeper expression is born - that space without words where experience, memory, and longing reside. From there, you'll receive tools to help translate words from that space onto your page. No longer just writing - you are creating art.
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Transformative for all levels of writers - an especially for people who consider themselves non-writers.
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Group classes. Workshops. Private Sessions.
All available online or in person.​​
