Words and Silences: Haiku from Kyrgyztan

May 23, 2014

Good news! Former AUCA professor, Steve Wolfe, published a book “Words and Silences: Haiku from Kyrgyzstan”. The book contains collection of haiku poems written by AUCA students.

The haiku collection is the result of a month-long intensive English-language haiku workshop conducted in March 2013 at the American University of Central Asia. The participants were 20 AUCA students from a cross-section of departments. The majority of the students were bilingual, fluent in both Russian and Kygyz. Most had never heard of haiku before taking part in the workshop.

No one would dispute that haiku originally sprouted in the literary soil of Japan. However, haiku has broken away from its native cultural roots and has been successfully transplanted in many cultures around the world. It has evolved into a poetic hybrid shaped by the unique cultural forces at play in each place in which it has re-sprouted.