The event (presentation and full Sunday luncheon) is scheduled for Sunday, 30 May at 12:00, at Onar Village in Kyrenia. The cost of admission is 30 TL, and seats should be reserved in advance at Sidestreets, Tel: +90 (392) 229-3070/1.

Celebrated poet, critic, editor and Professor Ravi Shankar, visiting faculty member at EMU for Spring 2010, will read from some of his work, including transliterations from the Sanskrit, collaborations with other poets, erasures, mash ups and sestinas, traversing a wide range of poetic possibility. As the founding editor of one of the oldest electronic journals of literature, Drunken Boat, he will discuss the potentialities that exist for electronic literature, and as the editor of a Norton anthology that gathered together 450 poets from 61 countries writing in over 40 different languages, he will discuss the trajectories and shapes of non-Western poetries, including the role translation plays in contemporary discourse. He will discuss how that most ancient of genres, poetry, situates itself in the mediated and constantly shifting global landscape and will punctuate his comments with performances of new poems, some of which will be debuted for the first time at Sidestreets.

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat <http://www.drunkenboat.com> which is just celebrating its tenth anniversary. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Gove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry form Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.), called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He is a recipient of a Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism (CCT) FY09 fellowship in Poetry, has received fellowships from Breadloaf, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, has won a Pushcart Prize, and served as a commentator on National Public Radio and on the BBC. He has two chapbooks of poetry coming out in 2010, including a collaboration with late American artist Sol LeWitt, Seamless Matter (Rain Taxi) nd Voluptuous Bristle (Finishing Line). His next book of poems won the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize. He is currently on the faculty of Eastern Mediterranean University, the Stonecoast Writers Conference and the first international MFA program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong. He has performed his work around the world, including at the Asia Society, PEN India, St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the National Arts Club.