"Speaking to “Bitter Winter” on World Poetry Day, [Uyghur poet Aziz Isa] Elkun urged the world to remember the more than five hundred Uyghur poets sentenced to lengthy jail terms for their “crime of writing poems,” and the “severe extrajudicial persecution endured by Uyghur poets at the hands of the Chinese [Communist Party] government.” “Their only crime was writing poems in their God-given mother language, ,” he said."