NYC Gazette

The City University of New York congratulates Distinguished Professors Kimiko Hahn of Queens College and Patricia Smith of College of Staten Island on their election to the 15-member board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry.

Chancellors serve six-year terms during which they consult with the organization on artistic matters, judge the organization’s largest legacy prizes for American poets and act as ambassadors of poetry in the world at large. Since 1946, 125 distinguished poets have been elected to this esteemed position.

“The poetic prowess of Distinguished Professors Kimiko Hahn and Patricia Smith, and their ability to use this art form to illustrate impactful stories, is well deserving of recognition,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “The CUNY community takes great pride in seeing two of our own elevated to this tremendous leadership capacity, representing the very best of our University’s world-class faculty. As we congratulate these two poets, we are eager to see how they continue to influence the world of poetry.”

A Distinguished Creative Writer 

Kimiko Hahn teaches creative writing and literary translation in the MFA program at Queens College, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1993 and was conferred the title of Distinguished Professor by the CUNY Board of Trustees in 2006.

She is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including “Foreign Bodies” and “The Unbearable Heart,” which received an American Book Award from the National Book Foundation in 1996. She frequently draws on, and even reinvents, classic forms and techniques such as the “zuihitsu,” a genre of Japanese literature popularized by “The Pillow Book” by Sei Shōnagon. In recent years, she has explored forms that give a nod to past writers and helped the University honor the lives of those it lost to COVID-19 with an original work she read aloud during a day of remembrance.

“This great honor is more than a title, as a chancellor is viewed as an ‘ambassador for poetry,’ and I am eager to learn what others have done over the years and are up to now,” said Hahn. “I am also eager to realize a role that coincides with the era we are in: war, climate change and the pandemic. But we are also in a time of learning empathy towards people who are different from oneself. Poetry can give one pause to look around, and from my students I know how poetry can make a difference to one’s vision of the world and of oneself. ”

Hahn, a president emeritus of the Poetry Society of America, is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also the recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, among other honors.

“Kimiko Hahn is a distinguished poet, teacher, and arts activist who has written more than eight books that explore female desire and subjectivity with an experimental broad brush,” said Academy of American Poets Chancellor Marilyn Chin. “Some of her innovative poems include adapting the Japanese form the zuihitsu and using a fast-brush diary mode that mimics the daily trials of women. She has also experimented with film and other mixed media ventures in her multifaceted poetic journey.”

A Well-Lauded Storyteller

Patricia Smith has been teaching creative writing at the College of Staten Island since joining the faculty as an assistant professor in 2009, rising to associate professor in 2015 and full professor in 2017 before the CUNY Board of Trustees conferred the title of Distinguished Professor in 2019.

She is a winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. She is the author of numerous collections, including “Unshuttered”; “Incendiary Art” (winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry); “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah” (winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize); and “Blood Dazzler,” which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Smith also edited the crime fiction anthology “Staten Island Noir.”

“I started out in the raucous and rebellious world of the poetry slam, and never dreamed that my work, and an incredibly nurturing writing community, would bring me here — in the place where the craft is celebrated and decisions are made,” said Smith. “I now get to work alongside so many of my heroes and teachers. What an otherworldly honor. Thrilled to share this news with my students and colleagues. And to all my poetry students, past and present: See, I TOLD you — there’s no life like a poet’s life!”

Smith is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Cave Canem faculty member and she is also a visiting professor at Princeton University. This month, Smith is serving as guest editor of the Academy of American Poets’ daily Poem-a-Day series of curated, previously unpublished modern poems.

“Patricia Smith is among the most gifted and revered of American poets, whose powerful testimonial art addresses the brutalities of racism, the precarity of Black youth and the vibrant cultural life of urban communities,” said Academy of American Poets Chancellor Carolyn Forché. “She is a poet of rare formal range, vibrant diction and dramatic virtuosity. Among her stunning collections, Blood Dazzler is rightfully regarded as a masterpiece of poetic response to historical tragedy. Already recognized for her artistry throughout the world, she will bring to the Academy of American Poets a knowledge of what is at stake in the literary art of our moment.”

Joining professors Hahn and Smith on the board are Princeton University’s Ilya Kaminsky and Northeastern University’s Ed Roberson.

“All that we publish, program and promote at the Academy of American Poets is fueled by the collective wisdom, imagination and expertise of our Chancellors,” said Academy of American Poets Board of Directors Chair Tess O’Dwyer. “It’s exhilarating to congratulate poets extraordinaire Kimiko Hahn, Ilya Kaminsky, Ed Roberson and Patricia Smith on their election and welcome them into the leadership of the Academy.”

Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize and fellowship programs. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings, and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit: https://poets.org/.

The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving 243,000 students of all ages and awarding 55,000 degrees each year. 

CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background.

Original source can be found here.