Award-winning poet and educator Kimiko Hahn, newly appointed to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, reads and discusses her work and poetic forms with host Cornelius Eady.
Kimiko Hahn’s new work plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Across her ten books of poetry, she casts a wide net for subject matter. In her latest collection Foreign Bodies (W.W. Norton), she 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. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive 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.