Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn is the author of 10 books of poetry, including Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (Norton, 2014); Toxic Flora (Norton, 2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (Norton, 2006), 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. Her book The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Norton.

Hahn is the winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her work is noted for its intertextuality and wide-ranging subject matter. In a review of Brain Fever for the Boston Review, Benjamin Landry notes

Hahn has always tried to discover effective forms for unruly thoughts. Her earlier work—wide-ranging in mode and theme—often aspired to the long-form zuihitsu, a diary-like monologue incorporating textbook definitions, email responses, exclamations, recalled speech, loose associations, declarations and reversals. These contemporary zuihitsu evinced an appealing honesty, replicating as they did the mind’s clutter. … Brain Fever does away with much of the clutter. …

… These poems glow with concentrated energy, and their dense arrangements usefully contain Hahn’s previous meandering tendencies. Consequently, these new poems exhibit the “gemlike” quality Hahn avowedly admires.

Hahn was born in Mount Kisco, New York. Her mother, Maude Miyako Hamai, was 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. 

From 1964 to 1965, the Hahns lived in Tokyo and then traveled west through Asia to Europe. When her family returned to New York City, Hahn and her sister were enrolled in Japanese language and dance classes at the New York Buddhist Church on Riverside Drive. There she became involved in social circles invested in the Asian American movement of the 1970s. 

In “Angel Island: The Roots and Branches of Asian American Poetry,” a lecture Hahn presented at the Asian American Literature Festival at the Library of Congress, she spoke about this formative time in her life: 

How could my parents have known that in dance class I’d meet Aichi Kochiyama and come to know her radical family (her mother Yuri Kochiyama, well known for her radical politics, held the dying Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom). Saturdays in the city were my workshop.

In her lecture, Hahn asserted that her early exposure to activism and community organizing as well as her racial identity profoundly influenced her approach to poetry.

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. In an entry for The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Cengage Learning), Juliana Chang wrote 

Hahn’s literary debt to Japanese women writers, however, should not be thought of as due to some essentialist connection between Asian American and Asian writers. … Her relationship to Japanese literature and culture were shaped, she says, not only by her Japanese American mother but also by her German American father’s aesthetic interests in Japanese culture and her own formal study of East Asian cultures in college and graduate school. Language for her is not only a writing tool but also subject matter. Fluency in more than one language highlights language itself as a construction that can be interrogated and played with.

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), BrittleProcess (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 teaches in the creative writing and literary translation program at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she is a distinguished professor.