My Funeral

Nâzim Hikmet, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, was born in 1902 in Salonica (then part of the Ottoman Empire, now in Greece) and grew up in Istanbul. A dedicated communist and fierce defender of the oppressed, he was imprisoned in Turkey in 1938 and released twelve years later after a campaign whose signatories included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre. Still hounded by the government, he migrated in 1951 to Stalin’s Moscow, where he died in 1963. His Turkish citizenship was reinstated posthumously in 2009. (updated 4/2022)

Steve Kronen is the author of the poetry collections Homage to Mistress Oppenheimer (Eyewear, 2018), Splendor (BOA Editions, 2006), and Empirical Evidence (University of Georgia Press, 1992). His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI​​​​​​, The Southern Review, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He is a librarian in Miami, where he lives with his wife, novelist Ivonne Lamazares, and their daughter. (updated 4/2022)