An Afternoon with New Poetry with Nicole Cooley, Karen Finley & Kimiko Hahn

Nicole Cooley is the author of six books of poems, including Of Marriage and Girl after Girl after Girl. Her first book, Resurrection, won the Walt Whitman Award. Raised in New Orleans, Cooley is professor of English in the MFA Program for Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY, and lives outside of New York City with her family.
Karen Finley is an artist, performer, and poet. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Finley was the named plaintiff for the Supreme Court case Finley v. NEA that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been presented internationally such as the Barbican in London; Lincoln Center, New York City; Art Basel in Miami; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. She is the author of ten books, including COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco (City Lights, March 2025) Grabbing Pussy (OR Books, 2018), the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment (City Lights, 2015), and The Reality Shows (Feminist Press, 2011). A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University. She lives in Westchester County, New York.
A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Kimiko Hahn has published more than ten collections on subjects ranging from Asian American identity and zuihitsu to rarified fields of science. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and, most recently, the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She teaches in the MFA program for Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York. Learn more at https://kimikohahn.com
Praise for the Books:
“In Mother Water Ash, Nicole Cooley mourns the death of her mother from the familiar and doomed landscape of New Orleans. These poems overflow with an essential truth: beloved people will change and disappear, while slightly more permanent cities, rivers, and levees have the audacity to go on without us. Read these haunting poems and weep.” ~Alison Pelegrin
COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco meditates on the extraordinary time of loss, isolation, and bizarre rituals of the Covid era and its aftermath. “Yep, she’s still got it. . . . Like the most inspiring religious services, ‘Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco’ ends on an optimistic note, with Finley pivoting from shock and horror at the lives lost, access and control over one’s body into hope–for change, peace, courage, love. And art. Always art.” –Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times
“Borrowing from [such writers as] Elizabeth Bishop and Chimako Tada, featuring ghosts and geoglyphs, writing in form and free verse, Kimiko Hahn’s broad and eclectic approach reveals a mind as vast as the terrains it traverses.”—Nicole Sealey, Poetry magazine
Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer’s artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.