Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. PLEASE RSVP HERE.
Join Milkweed Books as we present poet KIMIKO HAHN to celebrate her newest collection, The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems. She will be joined by torrin a. greathouse and Michael Kleber-Diggs.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kimiko Hahn is author of ten collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Her last collection, Foreign Bodies, revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal’s body, objects removed from children’s bodies, and hoarded things. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review.
In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships. In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
torrin a. greathouse is an award-winning transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, the New York Times Magazine, Copper Nickel, and The Kenyon Review. They have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, and The Ragdale Foundation. She is the author of DEED and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, a Minnesota Book Award and CLMP Firecracker Award finalist, and winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They teach in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Michael Kleber-Diggs Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Among other places, Kleber-Diggs’ writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and various anthologies. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. He lives in Minneapolis.
torrin a. greathouse
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. In 2020, they received fellowships from Zoeglossia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Michael Kleber-Diggs’s debut collection of poems, Worldly Things, won the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Michael teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.