Gather with readers and friends to honor the extraordinary Kimiko Hahn. An innovative poet, curator, professor, and collaborator, Hahn was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Her newest book, The Ghost Forest (W.W. Norton, 2024), offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer’s artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history.
Hahn will read from her new collection, and poets Tamiko Beyer, Mark Doty, and Roger Sedarat will read selections of their favorite works by Hahn throughout the decades.
Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow.
By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by Poets House Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the poets:
Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Tamiko Beyer is the co-editor of Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power. Her other books and chapbooks are Last Days (Alice James Books), We Come Elemental (Alice James Books), Dovetail (co-authored with Kimiko Hahn, Slapering Hol Press) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). Her poetry and articles have been published widely, including by Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review, Dusie, Black Warrior Review, Georgia Review, Lit Hub, and the Rumpus. She has received awards, fellowships, and residencies from Lambda Literary, PEN America, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, VONA, and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, among others. Photo by Susi Franco.
Mark Doty has published ten books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New & Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He is also the author of six books of nonfiction prose, most recently What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T.S.Eliot Prize in the U.K., the Stonewall Book Award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught in creative writing programs at Stanford, Princeton, Iowa, Columbia and New York University. He retired from Rutgers this year, and lives in the Hudson River Valley.
Roger Sedarat is the author of four poetry collections, including the award-winning Haji as Puppet. A recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize for verse translation, his renderings of classical and contemporary Persian poetry have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly Review. His most recently translated book, These Garden Nights: Ghazals of Hafez, is forthcoming from The Word Works Press. He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.