Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Nur Turkmani to discuss her debut collection, October. Nur is in conversation with Brandon Johnson, poet and Events Manager of The Writer’s Center.

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 Nur Turkmani is a writer and researcher from Beirut. Her work appears in The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, and New England Review, among others. She is the recipient of the Anthony Veasna So Award for Fiction from The Adroit Journal. Her debut poetry collection, October, will be out in April 2026 with Hajar Press.

About October 

October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza.

Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee.

Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.

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