STATE AUTHOR & STATE POET AWARDS CEREMONY

September 26 (Friday)

7:30 p.m. — Award Ceremony, Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center

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.

 

Kimiko Hahn will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry and Min Jin Lee will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction.

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Born in Mount Kisco, and raised in Pleasantville, Kimiko Hahn is the child of artists—a Japanese American mother from Hawai‘i and a German American father from Wisconsin. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College of the City University of New York.

She is the author of acclaimed poetry collections, including The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (2024), Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014); Toxic Flora (2010); The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006); The Unbearable Heart (1996), winner of the American Book Award; and Earshot (1992), winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize. In 2023, Hahn was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

  

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Min Jin Lee emigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of 7. She grew up in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens and learned to read and write at the Queens Public Library. She resides in Harlem.

Her novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and one of the New York Times’ "Ten Best Books of 2017." A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was also one of the "Ten Best Books" of the year for the BBC and the New York Public Library. Her debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007), a national bestseller, was named one of the best books of the year by the Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today.