Please join Belladonna* at James Gallery in collaboration with Center for the Humanities for the launch of new chaplets presenting translations from contemporary Turkish poetry. Translators Özge Özbek Akıman, Öykü Tekten, and Nicholas Glastonbury will be in attendance reading Emel İrtem, Betül Dünder, and Arkadaş Özger, respectively.

Please RSVP via Eventbrite here.

Özge Özbek Akıman teaches American literary history, poetry, and critical theory at the Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Türkiye. Specializing in African American literature and the New American Poetry, her scholarship on James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka and the New American Poetry has appeared or forthcoming in national and international journals. In addition to ongoing projects, her poetry translations have been published in national magazines.

Nicholas Glastonbury is a cultural anthropologist who researches and writes about the history of sonic media and the politics of listening across the Soviet/Turkish border during and after the Cold War. He is also a translator from the Turkish and Kurdish, with a particular interest in works that are weird, wayward, and unconventional. He co-founded the Null Subjects Collective, a workshop for literary translators dedicated to antiestablishment literature. Presently, he is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, editor, and archivist living between Granada and New York. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo, NY-based collective and press with a particular focus on work in and about translation, as well as a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, and World Poetry Review among other places. She is among the co-translators of Separated from the Sun by İlhan Sami Çomak (Smokestack Books, UK). Currently she works as a co-editor for the Best Literary Translations Anthology (Deep Vellum, 2024) and the general editor of Kurdish Poetry Chapbook Series (Pinsapo Press).

This reading is supported by grants from New York State Council on the Arts and NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.