A Queens College professor has been given the highest honors for her award-winning poetry.
Queens College professor Kimiko Hahn was named the New York State Poet by the New York State Writers Institute on Wednesday, June 18.
Hahn teaches in the college’s MFA program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation and was honored for her poetry, which was described as writings with “deep roots in the storied landscapes of New York.”
Hahn was recognized alongside Min Jin Lee, who was named the new State Author. Hahn will serve in the position for two years and receive a $10,000 honorarium.
The program was established in 1958 by then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to promote fiction and poetry in New York. Under the leadership of the New York State Writers Institute, selected honorees are awarded biennially.
Lee will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and Hahn will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a ceremony on Friday, Sept. 26, at 7:30 p.m. at the University at Albany’s Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12222.
The awardees were selected by a panel of judges convened by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. The state poet jurors included current State Poet Patricia Spears Jones, Colin Channer, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Honor Moore, and Arthur Sze.
Hahn is the author of 10 collections of poems, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (2024); Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014), Toxic Flora (2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006) The Unbearable Heart (1996), which received an American Book Award; and Earshot (1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.
Hahn is a New York native, born in Mount Kisco, Westchester County, and grew up in Pleasantville, a neighboring town.
At Queens College, Hahn established the university’s Chapbook Festival and helped to create a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library.
From 2016 to 2019, Hahn was President of the Board of Governors of the Poetry Society of America.
In 2023, she was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships.
