Kimiko Hahn & Rickey Laurentiis: Poetry Reading

A reading by Kimiko Hahn and Rickey Laurentiis, followed by a reception/signing with books for sale courtesy of McNally Jackson.

Thursday, October 30, 7pm

Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here

About the Poets:

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. Previous books Foreign Bodies, 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. She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their writing has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017),  Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded them a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where they were a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory. They are the trans author of Death of the First Idea (2025), from Knopfs, and Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry book by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions.