Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute Reading

Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024) which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.

In 2023, Kimiko 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. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) is a social justice activist including through her work as a poet and a civil rights attorney.  She’s a queer woman of color, and the daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India. Sunu lives in Washington, D.C. with her family. Her award-winning collection of poems, My Dear Comrades, was published by Regal House in 2023. Sunu’s work can also be found in Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets and The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Sunu is currently a Senior Advisor with Democracy Forward. She is on the board of the Transgender Law Center, and was included as one the Washington Blade’s Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love.  Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law and her MFA in Poetry from Queens College/The City University of New York. Sunu is delighted to celebrate her collection, My Dear Comrades, alongside the book’s fabulous cover artist, Ragni Agarwal.