The chapbook documents readings and talks from the first annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival, which was held in April, 2009 (Organizers: Buket Aydemir, Pelin Bali, Mehmet C. Ozturk & Birgul Tuzlali). The chapbook is a cooperative publication by scholars, poets, and members of the NC literary community that celebrates the work and influence of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. The chapbook includes commentary by NC Poet Laureate Katherine Stripling Byer, and articles on Nazim Hikmet's life and poetry by Greg Dawes (NC State University) and Erdag Goknar, (Duke University). Eight winning poems and two...

The chapbook of the Second Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival opens with the Festival's invited speaker, the renowned literary translator of Hikmet and a scholar of literature, Professor Mutlu Konuk Blasing of Brown University. Her analysis, "Nazim Hikmet: The Forms of Exile" establishes important insights about Hikmet's poetry of exile as reflected in the poet's mixed use of traditional and free verse forms. The rest of the chapbook is dedicated to poems submitted by the winners of the poetry competition. The competition received over five hundred poems from one hundred seventy poets...