State Author & State Poet Awards Ceremony

Name: State Author & State Poet Awards Ceremony
Start: 2025-09-26T19:30:00-04:00
Location: University At Albany

Schedule

Fri, 26 Sep, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

University At Albany | Albany, NY

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 -- novelist Min Jin Lee and poet Kimiko Hahn -- honoring their extraordinary craft and deep roots in the storied landscape of literary New York.
Join us for the State Author and State Poet Awards Ceremony
7:30 p.m. Friday, September 26
Recital Hall, UAlbany Performing Arts Center
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany NY 12222
Free and open to the public
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.
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.
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.