Fahri Oz will present a general picture of Whitman translations in Turkish so far; dwelling on his translation strategy he will also read excerpts from Leaves of Grass in Turkish.

Fahri Öz is an ex-academic, translator and poet. After signing Academic for Peace declaration in 2016, he was dismissed in 2017 from his position at Ankara University, where he taught British and American poetry, poetic genres, literary history and translation. He has translated into Turkish works by Christina Rossetti, Jack London, Saki, William Burroughs and Bob Dylan. He has co-authored and co-edited a collection of very short fiction in Turkish called Hayat Kısa Proust Uzun. He has written articles and book reviews on contemporary Turkish poetry and fiction in print and online media. Currently he has been working on the translation of Whitman’s complete poems into Turkish in four volumes, the first two volumes of which has so far been published. He has a book of poems (Meşrutiyet Çok Bulutlu On Beş Santigrat Yağmur Olasılığı Sıfır) that came out in 2019. He is translating also Emily Dickinson’s complete poems into Turkish. He is a visiting scholar at Iowa University and was one of residents of Iowa University International Writing Program.

Karen Karbiener, president and founding member of the Walt Whitman Initiative, is a Whitman scholar and teaches at New York University. Winner of the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and a Fulbright recipient, she has published widely on Whitman (most recently working with Brian Selznick on Live Oak, with Moss, a new illustrated edition of Whitman’s secret same-sex love poems).  As a cultural activist in her hometown, Karen has been working on the campaign to preserve 99 Ryerson Street since 2017, and gave testimony at the hearing to landmark 227 Duffield Place, Brooklyn, last year.  In 2019, Karen participated in the Canadian Whitmanites’ marathon reading of “Song of Myself” in Bon Echo Provincial Park, Canada.