Award-winning poet Brian Turner, who has written extensively about his wartime experience in Iraq as well as about post-combat life, will read on April 1 at 7 p.m. at Ciné Bar/Café/Cinema in downtown Athens. This event, sponsored by The Georgia Review and the Georgia Poetry Circuit, is open to the public free of charge.
Turner’s 2005 debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, offers a first-person account of the Iraq war. A New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” this collection won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the 2006 Pen Center USA “Best in the West” Award and the 2007 Poets Prize. His second collection, Phantom Noise, published in 2010 has continued to expand Turner’s readership in the U.S. and abroad.
Turner served seven years in the U.S. Army, including one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division.
The Georgia Poetry Circuit is a coalition of colleges and universities that annually supports statewide tours by three nationally recognized poets. The Georgia Review, the quarterly journal of arts and letters founded at UGA in 1947 and published there ever since, has been the UGA sponsor since the tour’s 1985 inception.