Kimiko Hahn  Kimiko Hahn (born July 5, 1955) is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her work frequently deals with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities. Kimiko Hahn was born in Mount Kisco, New York on July 5, 1955. Her parents are both artists. Her mother, Maude Miyako Hamai, was a Japanese American from Maui, Hawaii; her father, Walter Hahn, was a German American from Wisconsin. They met in Chicago, where Walter was a friend of notable African-American author, Ralph Ellison. Hahn grew up in Pleasantville, New York, and between 1964 and 1965, the Hahns later lived in Tokyo, Japan. As a teen, she became involved in the New York City Asian American movement of the 1970s. Zhou Xiaojing has commented that her racially mixed background influenced "her profound understanding of the politics of the body" as seen in her poetry (113). In the U.S., her Asian appearance made some schoolmates "called her Chinese or Japanese, never regarding her as an American like them. Yet when she went to Japan … her schoolmates [there] called her American or 'gaijin'" (113). Hahn received a bachelor's degree in English and East Asian Studies from the University of Iowa and an M.A. in Japanese Literature from Columbia University. She is a distinguished professor at Queens College, CUNY and has also taught at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and University of Houston. Her sister is Tomie Hahn, a performer and ethnologist. Hahn is married to true crime writer Harold Schechter. She has two daughters, Miyako Tess and Reiko Lily, from a previous marriage to Ted Hannan. The major themes of Hahn's poetry explores Asian American female desire and subjectivity. The judges' citation from the Pen/Voelcker Award noted: "With wild courage Kimiko Hahn's poems voyage fearlessly into explorations of love, sexuality, motherhood, violence, and grief and the way gender inscribes us." Her poetry draws from feminist works of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Adrienne Rich, more canonical American poets such as T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams poetic experimentations, as well as Japanese culture and literature. The title of "The Narrow Road to the Interior" (W.W. Norton, 2006), for instance, is drawn from Bashō's "Oku no Hosomichi."