Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn (she/her) was born in Mount Kisco, New York. Her mother, Maude Miyako Hamai, was a Japanese American from Maui, Hawaii. Her father, Walter Hahn, was a German American from Wisconsin. Both of her parents were artists who met while studying in Chicago. Hahn grew up in Pleasantville, New York. 

Hahn earned a BA from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Marvin Bell, Louise Glück, Charles Wright, and Rita Dove. She returned to New York and earned an MA in Japanese literature from Columbia University. 

Hahn is the author of multiple books of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (2024), Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014); Toxic Flora (2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), all from W. W. Norton, a collection that takes its title from Bashô’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), winner of the American Book Award; and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.

Hahn initiated the organization of a Chapbook Festival, sponsored by major literary organizations and held at the City University of New York Graduate Center for five years. She is a proponent of chapbooks and art books and has published several over the years: Brood (Sarabande Books, 2020), Brittle Process (Paper Nautilus, 2019), Resplendent Slug (Ghostbird Press, 2016), and Boxes with Respect (Center for Book Arts, 2011). In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail (Slapering Hol Press). Hahn has also written for film, with work appearing in Coal Fields, a 1985 experimental documentary by Bill Brand; Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing, a 1995 MTV special; and Everywhere at Once, a 2008 film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photographs and narrated by Jeanne Moreau. 

Hahn is the winner of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the 2007 Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been supported by fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2016–2019, she served as president of the board at the Poetry Society of America. In January 2023, Hahn was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College of the City University of New York. 

In 2023, Hahn was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.