16th Annual Westchester Poetry Reading

Please join us on Friday, April 10, in-person, at The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry for the 16th Annual Westchester Poetry Festival featuring Kimiko Hahn, Lauren Camp, Samyak Shertok, and Phylisha Villanueva. Books will be available for purchase onsite.

Please note the event will be located at the new Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center right next door to Estherwood, at 49 Clinton Avenue. The event is free to attend, but we are always grateful for an optional donation to support the readers’ honoraria. We appreciate your continued support.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eleven books of poems, including: The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2024); Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (WWN, 2014), and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), all collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior (WWN, 2006), a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. Hahn’s major contribution to American literary scene may be the introduction of a genre that is neither poetry nor prose: the Japanese zuihitsu. In the Asian American Writer’s Workshop journal, The Margins, Dana Isokawa wrote: “Hahn laid the groundwork for the zuihitsu in American poetry, in particular with her collection The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006). Shortly after the book came out, Hahn shared in a BOMB interview that she initially studied zuihitsu in an academic setting but started writing them in the nineties after being invited to do so for a reading at the Poetry Project celebrating Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book. While the zuihitsu is frequently compared to an essay, Hahn showed its possibilities as a poetic text.” The writer Rajiv Mohabir has said of her: “[The zuihitsu] was brought into the world of American poetry through the work of Kimiko Hahn and it resists simple genre definition, relying on temperature and voice, arrangement and precision.” She wrote a 2021 article for the American Poetry Review, “The Zuihitsu and the Toadstool” and, at present, she and Dana Isokawa are co-editing an anthology of zuihitsu, from the Japanese classics on to contemporary American versions (forthcoming W.W. Norton, 2026). As part of Hahn’s service to the CUNY community, she initiated a Chapbook Festival that became an annual event co-sponsored by major literary organizations. Since then, she has added chapbooks to her list of publications: (Write it!): a collection of odes, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, and Resplendent Slug. In 2017, she and Tamiko Beyer collaborated on the chapbook Dovetail. She takes pleasure in the challenges of collaboration: writing text for film including: Coal Fields, the 1985 experimental documentary by Bill Brand; Ain’t Nuthin’ but a She Thing a 1995 HBO special; and Everywhere at Once, a 2008 film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau). Hahn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University. Hahn has also taught for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and Kundiman. 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. She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027. She lives in New York where she is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Lauren Camp is the author of nine books, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026) and In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Other honors include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, a Dorset Prize, the New Mexico Book Award, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, Kenyon Review, and Poem-a-Day and have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She served as the second New Mexico Poet Laureate (2022-25). www.laurencamp.com

Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Waxwing, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Phylisha Villanueva is a Belizean-American poet, author, and educator whose work explores identity, resilience, and mysticism. Born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, her storytelling is deeply informed by her Belizean heritage and shaped by her experiences navigating womanhood, motherhood, and survival. She co-founded The Yonkers Writing Group and launched the Blue Door Art Center Open Mic Night in 2009. Villanueva is also a proud member of the Jazz and Poetry Choir Collective and the international women’s poetry collective Tesoro. In January 2024, she was appointed Westchester County’s second Poet Laureate, becoming the first woman of color to hold the title. In this role, she has continued her work as a teaching artist with ArtsWestchester, hosted open mics at Bethany Arts Community, led poetry workshops at the Westchester County Correctional Facility, and co-curated an exhibition with the Hudson River Museum, where she collaborated with fellow writers to bring fresh perspectives to the museum’s archives and collection. At the historic swearing-in of Deputy County Executive Ken Jenkins—the first African American to serve in that position—Villanueva read her poem “Hope for Us is a Deep Current.” She has also shared her work at the Nuyorican Poets Café, New York University, John Jay College, Pace University, St Francis College, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Center, and the Bahá’í Center.