Introduction

In a special episode of the Poetry Podcast, Kimiko Hahn, Monica Youn, Paul Tran, and Megan Fernandes join Kevin Young to read their work, and to discuss Asian-American poetics and the role of poetry in our tumultuous times.

Kimiko Hahn, a distinguished professor at Queens College, City University of New York, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poems, including, most recently, “Foreign Bodies.”

Monica Youn, a former lawyer and a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, teaches at Princeton. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, she will publish a new book of poems, “From From,” in 2023.

Paul Tran, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, has received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 92Y Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Their debut poetry collection, “All the Flowers Kneeling,” will be published in 2022.

Megan Fernandes is an assistant professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. A finalist for the Kundiman Book Prize and the Saturnalia Book Prize, her most recent poetry collection is “Good Boys.”