GREAT BAY, St. Martin (August 30, 2003) — Over the weekend St. Martin poet Changa Hickinson winded down a tour of Indonesia as part of the fourth leg of the Winternachten 2003 overseas literary festival.
According to Changa, who left here about a week ago, he felt honored to represent St. Martin among other poets and novelists from the Caribbean, The Netherlands, South Africa, and the host country of Indonesia.
Before leaving, Changa said that the poems that he would recite in the various Indonesian cities were developed during the Creative Writing Program (CWP) that he participated in from January to July 2003. In fact, through the CWP he was also able to recite at the Winternachten literary festival’s Caribbean launch in St. Martin in April. He then hopped on the caravan of writers to Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao.
Within a few months after the festival’s second overseas tour, and organizers no doubt being impressed with Changa’s work and delivery, the poet/author was called up again to represent
St. Martin in that other part of the world known for its beautiful islands. Indonesia alone is constituted of 16,500 islands.
The Winternachten foundation is based in The Hague, where it organizes an annual literary festival at the opening of each year. This year it set out from its home-base on an ambitious “overzee” or overseas tour that touched down in South Africa in March, followed by the Caribbean and now Indonesia, picking up writers on the way to both recite in their land or travel with colleagues and new literary kin to the different countries and territories. The Indonesia tour concluded on August 31.
Changa is the author of Illegal Truth, his first book of poems, which has been sold out since published here in 1991. He is currently working on a new manuscript of poems.