Second Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

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, "N'zim 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 representing places as far afield as Alaska and Malta.The festival and the poetry competition were organized by American Turkish Association of North Carolina. The festival has taken place on April 18, 2010 in Cary, NC. The festival organizers were Buket Aydemir, Pelin Bali, Erdag Goknar, Mehmet C. Ozturk and Birgul Tuzlali.