Kimiko Hahn Poetry Reading

The Katonah Poetry Series is pleased to feature Westchester native and current president of the Poetry Society of America, Kimiko Hahn. Hahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Brain Fever (W. W. Norton, 2014), and Toxic Flora (W. W. Norton, 2010). She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the NY Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 1992 title Earshot was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.  The Unbearable Heart (1995) won an American Book Award.

Her work draws on and reimagines uniquely Asian literary territory such as the pillow book and nu shu, the secret written language once used exclusively by Chinese women to communicate with their closest friends. The Narrow Road to the Interior explores both the classic Basho work of the same name and the ancient Japanese literary form zuihitsu—running brush—to create a volume that has been described as “formally innovative and informally contemplative.” Tracy K. Smith writes, “In Brain Fever Kimiko Hahn… touches concrete ground in the realm of neuroscience, and in the world outside the mind, where love, betrayal, regret, and debilitating loss reside. This is a beautiful and troubling book, a marriage of what matters most: the mysteries buried at our very core and the world that cradles and cuts into us at every turn.”

Born in Mount Kisco and raised in Pleasantville, Hahn is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

Doors open at 3:30 for open seating. Katonah Village Library is an easy walk from the Metro North Katonah train station. The reading will be followed by audience Q & A, as well as a book signing and a complimentary reception.