Menu
Visit Costa Rica via PCPL travel series
Putnam County Public Library invites the public to share the next destination in the PCPL Travel Talks series on Wednesday, Oct. 10 at 6:30 p.m.
Joe and Jenny Heithaus will present a slide show and talk about the natural and human wonders their family encountered while traveling in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and living in Monteverde, a mountain village named by Quakers in the early 1950s.
Heithaus, a DePauw University English professor, and his family spent his fall 2017 sabbatical in Monteverde, which was ravaged by Hurricane Nate in October 2017.
Living a short walk from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve during their time in Costa Rica, the Greencastle residents encountered incredible flora and fauna. The Heithaus daughters attended the Monteverde Friends School and they all became part of a vibrant, ecologically aware Quaker community.
Heithaus wrote essays about their time and kept a weekly blog about his encounters. He’ll read from some of his work and share photos he, his daughters and his wife Jenny took along the way.
A noted poet, Heithaus won the 2007 Discovery/The Nation Prize for a group of sonnets about poison plants that are the central thread of his first book, “Poison Sonnets,” published in 2012. He is one of five “Airpoets,” whose poems have been integrated into stained-glass window murals in the Indianapolis International Airport and are featured in two books, “Rivers, Rails and Runways” and “Airmail.”
His poems have appeared in Poetry, the North American Review, the African-American Review and the Southern Review.