Saturday, June 7 – Free admission University of St. Martin (USM), Philipsburg
9 am – 10:30 am
II – “On imprisonment and injustice based on my grandfather’s life” – A Creative Writing Workshop, Rm 103
Using the Kubota wartime poems from his strongest poetry book, Coral Road, and sample poems from great poets Miguel Hernandez, Nazim Hikmet, and Tadeusz Rozewicz, the lives of unjustly incarcerated poets and others come alive in this workshop by Prof. Garrett Hongo. What about Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment story or that of a Chinese detainee on Angel Island? What about a literary sample about rebuilding a country after war? For some this workshop might turn out to be the most thematic of the St. Martin Book Fair 2014.
by Garrett Hongo, poet, distinguished professor, author (USA)
Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai`i and grew up on the North Shore of O`ahu and in Los Angeles. He was educated at Pomona College, the University of Michigan, and UC Irvine, where he received an M.F.A. His work includes three books of poetry, three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai`i. He is the editor of The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America and Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America. Poems and essays of his have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, APR, Honolulu Weekly, Amerasia Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review, Raritan, and the LA Times. Among his honors are the Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His latest book of poetry, Coral Road, was published by Knopf in 2011. He is presently at work on a book of non-fiction entitled The Perfect Sound. He teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.
IX – Media Workshop, Rm 105
Who determines when subjects such as ethnic relations, the women’s rights movement, government corruption, a prime minister’s threats to silence the media, and treatment of political prisoners become too “highly controversial” for reporters to write about and for the general public to read or know about? When the Turkish newspaper Habertürk fired Ece Temelkuran as a columnist it was for writing critical pieces on the treatment of the Kurdish. How were the government and the country’s military affected by her reporting? How is she still affected by the murder not long ago of one journalist and the jailing of two others is an attempt to silence the media? In this workshop Temelkuran will discuss her real and frightening life experiences with “Crime&Punishment” and her resistance to intimidation.
by Ece Temelkuran, journalist, media rights activist, author, (Turkey)