Creative Writing Program
Department of English
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Flushing, NY 11367

718-997-4600

Unisphere photo by Rik Panganiban; other photos by Charles Martin

Professor Kimiko Hahn

Klapper 703, 718-887-4712
Kimiko.Hahn@qc.cuny.edu

Kimiko Hahn is the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawai’i and a German American father from Wisconsin. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and East Asian studies with a certificate in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program and committed to exploring new pedagogical avenues in this discipline.

Hahn is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); The Artist's Daughter (2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile (Hanging Loose Press, 1998); and The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1995), which received an American Book Award. Other honors include fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award; also, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize. From the judges’ citation for the PEN/Voelcker Award: “With wild courage Kimiko Hahn’s poems voyage fearlessly into explorations of love, sexuality, motherhood, violence, and grief and the way gender inscribes us.” Hahn describes her current writing concerns: “I continue to be fascinated with outside source material, especially in my subverted versions of the Japanese classical form, the zuihitsu.”