ASU Education Partnerships

October 8, 2009 Avondale, AZ—Award winning poet Kimiko Hahn will meet with students at La Joya Community High School on Thursday, October 15th, from 12:00 to 2:00 P.M. as part of an ASU outreach effort to connect kids to creative writing. Kimiko Hahn will read from her work and discuss the craft of writing with approximately 140 students in the La Joya lecture hall.  The author will also meet with La Joya teachers from 2:00 – 2:45 for a roundtable discussion about the teaching of creative writing.  

Hahn comes to La Joya through a partnership between ASU’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and The Young Writers Program . Hahn is part of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series, which annually brings prominent writers to ASU and the greater Phoenix metropolitan community to teach graduate seminars, lecture on and off campus, and engage in cultural discussions with local media, educators, community artists, and the general public. The event is being co-sponsored by ASU’s Young Writers Program (YWP), an outreach program through the Office of Youth Preparation (Office of the Vice President for Education Partnerships) (www.asu.edu/oyp) that partners university writers with classroom teachers to improve student writing skills and La Joya’s Creative Writing Club, a club dedicated to support the writers on La Joya’s campus, sponsored by teacher Mark Broeske.

Kimiko Hahn was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, the child of artists, a Japanese American mother from Hawaii and a German American father from Wisconsin.  She is the author of eight collections of poetry, including, The Unbearable Heart which received an American Book Award; Earshot, a Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006)—whose title is stolen from the haiku master, Basho—consists of work inspired by Japanese classical forms; and the forthcoming, Toxic Flora, poems prompted by science. She has also written for film; the latest, Everywhere At Once, was narrated by Jeanne Moreau and presented at The Cannes and Tribeca Film Festivals. Her work often explores desire and death, and the intersections of conflicting identities.

Hahn is the recipient of the 2008 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, given biennially to an American poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation. She has taught in the MFA programs at New York University and the University of Houston, and is currently a distinguished professor in the English Department and MFA program at Queens College/CUNY and lives in New York.

For more information about ASU’s Young Writers Program (www.asu.edu/ywp)  or the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (www.asu.edu/piper), contact Sean Nevin at (602) 727-1387 or email snevin@asu.edu. For more information on La Joya Community High School’s creative writing program, contact Mark Broeske at (623)-478-4507 or email mark.broeske@tuhsd.org.