NYS Writers Institute announces New York State Author and New York State Poet
- NYS Writers Institute
- Jun 18
- 5 min read
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.”
The awardees are chosen by panels of jurors convened by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
State Author Jurors: Current State Author Jacqueline Woodson, Cristina Garcia, Danielle Evans, William Kennedy, and Adelle Waldman.
State Poet Jurors: Current State Poet Patricia Spears Jones, Colin Channer, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Honor Moore, and Arthur Sze.
Lee will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and Hahn will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a ceremony to take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 26, at the University at Albany’s Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12222.
The State Author and State Poet ceremony serves as the official kickoff for the 8th Annual Albany Book Festival, presented by the NYS Writers Institute on Saturday, Sept. 27, at the University at Albany, during which Lee and Hahn will appear at an informal conversation at 10:30 a.m.
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.
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.
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.
“No other college or university in the nation carries out our unique mission of selecting the recipients through the work of a panel of acclaimed authors and poets, a jury of literary peers, which makes the award especially meaningful,” Grondahl said.
Past recipients
New York State Author
Jacqueline Woodson 2023-2025
Ayad Akhtar 2021-2023
Colson Whitehead 2018-2021
Edmund White 2016-2018
Alison Lurie 2012-2014
Mary Gordon 2008-2010
Russell Banks 2004-2006
Kurt Vonnegut 2001-2003
James Salter 1998-2000
Peter Matthiessen 1995-1997
William Gaddis 1993-1995
Norman Mailer 1991-1993
E. L. Doctorow 1989-1991
Grace Paley 1986-1988
New York State Poet
Patricia Spears Jones 2023-2025
Willie Perdomo 2021-2023
Alicia Ostriker 2018-2021
Yusef Komunyakaa 2016-2018
Marie Howe 2012-2014
Jean Valentine 2008-2010
Billy Collins 2004-2006
John Ashbery 2001-2003
Sharon Olds 1998-2000
Jane Cooper 1995-1997
Richard Howard 1993-1995
Audre Lorde 1991-1993
Robert Creeley 1989-1991
Stanley Kunitz 1986-1988
The New York State Writers Institute gratefully acknowledges Governor Kathy Hochul and the Executive Chamber staff for their assistance with the New York State Author and Poet Awards.