NYS Writers Institute, October 21, 2014
4:15 p.m. Seminar | Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
8:00 p.m. Reading | Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Three major American poets— Edward Hirsch, Kimiko Hahn, and Marie Howe— will read from their work and discuss the importance and future of poetry on Tuesday, October 21, 2014 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., the writers will present an informal seminar in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the uptown campus. The events are free and open to the public, and are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.

PROFILE
Three major American poets—Edward Hirsch, Kimiko Hahn and Marie Howe— will red from their work and discuss the importance and future of poetry at the University at Albany under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute.

Edward Hirsch, poet, outspoken advocate for the art of poetry, and President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, is the author most recently of A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a monumental reference work about poetry’s devices, forms and techniques. Booklist called it, “a vibrant, polyglot, world-circling, century-spanning, mind-expanding work of profound scholarship and literary art,” and said, “A thrilling ‘repertoire of poetic secrets,’ this radiant compendium is shaped by Hirsch’s abiding gratitude for the demands and power, illumination, and solace of poetry, ‘a human fundamental.’”

Winner of numerous prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award (for the 1986 collection, Wild Gratitude), Hirsch is also the author of the surprise 1999 bestseller, How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry). This September, Hirsch also published Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son who died in 2011 at the age of 22.

Kimiko Hahn, award-winning poet, is the author most recently of Brain Fever: Poems (2014), a collection that explores the poet’s experiences as woman, wife, mother, daughter and artist in the light of her personal fascination with neuroscience and the latest findings of cognitive research. Poet Tracy K. Smith said, “This is a beautiful and troubling book, a marriage of what matters most: the mysteries buried at our very core and the world that cradles and cuts into us at every turn.”

The child of artists—a Japanese-American mother and German-American father—Hahn is celebrated for work rooted in Japanese and Chinese aesthetics, particularly the forms and techniques of women writers in East Asia, both ancient and modern. Hahn received the American Book Award for her 1995 collection, The Unbearable Heart.  Her other collections include Toxic Flora (2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), and The Artist’s Daughter (2002). Her prizes include the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Appointed New York State Poet by Governor Andrew Cuomo under the aegis of the NYS Writers Institute (2012-2014), Marie Howe recently partnered with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Poetry Society of America to create the “Poetry in Motion Springfest,” a National Poetry Month celebration featuring poetry and music inside Grand Central Terminal. She also helped organized the first New York State “Poetry Unites – My Favorite Poem” Contest for the best short essay about a favorite poem. Open to all residents of New York State, the contest announced four winners in May 2014.

Admired for poetry that seeks answers to metaphysical questions in ordinary day-to-day experience, Howe is the author of the collections, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008); The Good Thief (1998); and What the Living Do (1997). Playwright Eve Ensler said of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, “These poems made me gasp. Each one a revelation, a lifeline, a domestic galaxy. This is the poetry of our times, a guide to living on the brink of the mystical and the mundane.”

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.