Center for the literary arts in New York State
NEW YORK STATE AUTHOR & NEW YORK STATE POET
June 18, 2025
The New York State Writers Institute proudly announces novelist Min Jin Lee has been named the new State Author and Kimiko Hahn the new State Poet honoring their extraordinary craft and deep roots in the storied landscape of literary New York.
The citations, established in 1985 by Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to promote fiction and poetry in New York, are awarded biennially under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute. Awardees serve for two years in their honorary positions and each receives a $10,000 honorarium.
“We send a resounding congratulations to our two new laureates,” said Paul Grondahl, Opalka Endowed Director of the NYS Writers Institute. “We shout out the news loud and clear so that it carries from the summit of Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks to the Montauk Point Lighthouse on the South Fork of Long Island and echoes across the great State of New York. The literary arts are alive and well in the Empire State.”
STATE AUTHOR & STATE POET AWARDS CEREMONY
7:30 p.m. Friday, September 26, 2025
Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany NY 12222
The Albany Book Festival will kick off with a ceremony to honor the new State Author and State Poet for 2025-2027. Join us as we celebrate two New York writers who embody the vitality of literary art in New York State.
With thanks to generous sponsors and donors, these events are free and open to the public and will be held at UAlbany's Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue. More information at https://www.albanybookfestival.com.
New York State Author Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to Queens, New York with her family when she was seven years old. She attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, studied history at Yale College, and law at Georgetown University. Lee practiced law for two years before she left the profession to pursue writing. She teaches fiction and essay writing at Amherst College and lives in New York City.
Lee’s literary career is also closely intertwined with New York. Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), is set in Manhattan and explores the lives of Korean American immigrants navigating class, identity, and ambition in the city.
Pachinko (2017), her second novel, an epic story which follows a Korean family who migrates to Japan, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
She is a recipient of fiction fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was inducted in the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame, and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
Photo credit: Hae Ran of Channel Yes
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
New York State Poet Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn was born in Mount Kisco, Westchester County, and grew up in neighboring Pleasantville. She is the author of 10 collections of poems, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (2024); Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014), Toxic Flora (2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006) The Unbearable Heart (1996), which received an American Book Award; and Earshot (1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.
A distinguished professor at Queens College, City University of New York, she initiated the university’s Chapbook Festival and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library.
From 2016-2019, Hahn was President of the Board of Governors, Poetry Society of America.
In 2023, she 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.
The New York State Author award is named for Edith Wharton (1862-1937), widely regarded as one of America’s great novelists. Born in New York City into wealth and social status, she exposed in her darkly elegant fiction the hypocrisies and pressures of New York’s high society, particularly through her examination of the role and conditions of women. Many of Wharton’s works, like The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, continue to exert a powerful hold on the popular imagination. In a phrase she herself used to describe successful short fiction, her prose is “a shaft driven straight into the heart of experience.”
The New York State Poet award is named for Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the renowned “poet of democracy” born in Huntington, Long Island. More than any American poet of his era, Whitman has had the greatest and most long-lasting influence on American poetry. His masterwork, Leaves of Grass, heralded a new age of innovation in poetry with its absence of rhyme and standard meter and through its abundance of oratorical rhythms. A favorite poet of liberal political movements in 19th-century Europe, Whitman continues to influence poets around the world.
State Author and State Poet honorees
State Author
Min Jin Lee 2025-present