Kimiko Hahn was born in 1955 in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin.
She received an undergraduate degree in English and east Asian studies from the University of Iowa, and a master’s degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 1984.
She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior, The Artist’s Daughter, Mosquito & Ant, Volatile, and The Unbearable Heart. She is currently completing a collection on poems inspired by science, Toxic Flora.
She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, The Shelley Memorial Prize, an American Book Award, a Theodore Roethke Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award.
She lives in New York City and teaches at the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.
Her poems “Copes Rule,” “Nepen