[5] When he arrived at college, he and his fellow students from Xinjiang, including now-noted poet Perhat Tursun, knew little Chinese.

[1] Upon returning to the Uyghur region in the early 1990s, Tursun and Izgil started publishing their avant-garde poetry and attracted a following.

[5] Free verse was a departure from traditional Uyghur lyric composition, which has a strong emphasis on syllabic metrical forms like aruz.

[5] Using this new form, they wrote openly about "sex, religion, and the ongoing cultural life of shamanism and superstition that tie Uyghurs to land and embodied ritual practice.

[5] For them, Sufi ideas and attitudes had the power to contest ethno-national conservatism, allowing them to reclaim Uyghur identity by being "true to their own personal sense of self" and affirming "a love of contemporary life itself.

"[5] Both these features of their poetics were departures from that of canonical 20th century poets like Abdurehim Ötkür, the father of modern Uyghur poetry, who had written traditional lyrics with a Socialist Realist ethos.

[4] In the mid-1990s, Izgil was detained in a labor camp for three years for carrying allegedly sensitive documents, including newspaper articles about Uyghur separatist attacks, on an attempted trip to study in Turkey.

[13] In August 2017, as the Chinese government began its mass internment of Uyghurs, he fled with his family to northern Virginia, where he currently lives.

[14] His video testimony, recorded by the Wall Street Journal, was later used in the popular American news satire show Last Week Tonight.

[16][17] Izgil says distrust among Uyghurs abroad, many of whom suspect others spy for Beijing, has greatly reduced attendance to his poetry readings in the US.

[2] He has also chosen to speak on the record to the Wall Street Journal, a prominent US newspaper, about his escape and exile, with great risk to his family back home.