Over the past half century, Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum has hosted readings by more than 20 recipients of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most significant poetry prizes in the country. International Poetry Forum alumni who have received the Ruth Lilly Prize include greats such as Lucille Clifton, John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, Martín Espada, Sharon Olds, and more.
On January 5, 2025, we are delighted to welcome Kimiko Hahn, winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Prize, to offer a reading and discussion of the influence of haiku poet Matsuo Bashō on her work, particularly the The Narrow Road to the Interior.
This special reading will begin at 3PM at City of Asylum (40 W. North Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15212). Books will be available for sale by City of Asylum Bookstore. This free event is co-hosted by Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know when tickets are released.
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 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. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
