Queens College Hosts Public Reading by Newly Appointed New York State Poet Laureate Kimiko Hahn, CUNY Distinguished Professor at the College
Flushing, NY, October 21, 2025—On Wednesday, October 22, Queens College will host “A Reading by NYS Poet Laureate Kimiko Hahn,” the nationally respected poet, who is also a CUNY Distinguished Professor in the college’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Named New York State Poet Laureate in June, Hahn will hold the appointment for two years (2025–2027). The free, public reading will be held Wednesday, October 22, at 7 pm in LeFrak Concert Hall. It is a Writers at Queens event organized as part of the English Department’s Queens College Reading Series. The event will include a Q&A facilitated by poet and MFA alumna Sonia Arora, a reception, and a book signing; the reading will also be available over Zoom at bit.ly/3JOXkF7.
“To be fully appreciated, poetry should be read aloud—something Professor Hahn does very well,” says Queens College President Frank H. Wu. “Our graduate students are fortunate to study with such an accomplished writer, and we at the college are happy to shine a spotlight on her elegant and always thought-provoking work. We are delighted that she has received this much-deserved honor from our state.”
Hahn, who holds a BA in English and East Asian studies from the University of Iowa and a master’s in Japanese literature from Columbia University, has taught at Queens College since 1993. The daughter of two artists and a native of Westchester County, she is a prolific writer who draws on her own bicultural, European and Japanese sensibilities as well as her personal interests in science—notably neuroscience. Her poetry explores such challenging themes as life and death, love and betrayal, desire and gender, and layers and complexities of racial and other identities.
Hahn has published eleven collections of poetry, including her most recent book, The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2024). Like much of her work, it explores multicultural and historical poetic form as both an inspiration and a field for her own voice and innovation. Such aesthetic explorations have included Japanese zuihitsu; the golden shovel, a formal homage to past writers; and the glosa, a Spanish poetic form dating from the fifteenth century. In Queens she is well known for organizing festivals in support of modern chapbooks—small collections of poetry published inexpensively in the past that are now often produced by artisanal small presses. She donated more than 200 examples from her own library to found the Chapbooks Collection in Queens College’s Rosenthal Library.
Over the course of her career, Hahn has won many awards. Her book The Unbearable Heart received a National Book Award. She has also been the recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Pen-Voelcker Award, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. She has been awarded many fellowships, notably from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2023 she was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Event cosponsors include Asian American Community Studies; the Kupferberg Center for the Arts; QCAP, the Queens College AANAPISI Project (funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–Supporting Institutions), and the Queens College School of Arts.
For more information, click HERE.
-30-