Kimiko Hahn, poet, at AWP in Los Angeles, CA in March 2025

By Renee DeLorenzo

Queens College hosted a poetry reading by Kimiko Hahn, a distinguished professor at the Flushing-based college who was recently appointed by the New York State Writers Institute to serve as poet laureate of the state for the next two years.

The celebrated poet read at LeFrak Concert Hall on Oct. 22 and participated in a short Q&A session hosted by her former student, Sonia Arora. Attendees then filtered into the lobby for a reception that included light refreshments and a book-signing for her most recent publication, “The Ghost Forest.”

The 368-page book, which includes her older work as well as 40 new poems, begins with her newest pieces and travels backward in time to her oldest. Her intention, Hahn said, is to take the reader on a journey back to the young woman she was when her work was first published in “We Stand Our Ground: Three Women, Their Vision, Their Poems,” in 1988.

‘Playing with language’

Hahn, 70, the daughter of artists with a love for language, has been creating and exploring different forms of poetry for decades. Born in Mount Kisco, NY, in 1955 to a Japanese American mother, Maude Miyako Hamai, and German American father, Walter Hahn, she spent the first two years of her life in Italy.

Even though she couldn’t understand its meaning, she was drawn to the sounds of the Italian language. Her mother would also read to her in Japanese, a language she eventually learned when she was about 8-years-old.

“Language to me, to my ear, is very playful and fun,” Hahn said. “At an early age, I realized there’s more than one way to say something, and that’s kind of marvelous. That’s magical.”

To read the entire article: https://qns.com/2025/10/queens-college-poet-kimiko-hahn/

Photo credit: Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons