On Sunday, March 26 at 4:00 pm, the Katonah Poetry Series continues its 50th Anniversary Season with a reading by Westchester native Kimiko Hahn.
Born in Mt. Kisco, raised in Pleasantville, Hahn is the author of nine poetry collections and is the current president of the Poetry Society of America. Hahn studied English literature and Asian Studies at the University of Iowa, then earned a masters in Japanese literature at Columbia University. She has taught at the University of Houston and New York University, and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York 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 seeks to reimagine 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.”
Brain Fever (Norton, 2014), her most recent volume, was reviewed as follows: “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.”