Kimiko Hahn and Michelle Whittaker Read at Writers Speak Wednesdays on November 8

Poets Kimiko Hahn and Michelle Whittaker will be the final guests in the fall Writers Speak Wednesdays series of free author talks, readings, and conversations open to the public at Stony Brook Southampton. The program will include a reading and conversation followed by a Q&A session on Wednesday, November 8, at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of Brain Fever and eight other collections of poetry, including Toxic Flora, The Narrow Road to the Interior, The Artist’s Daughter, Mosquito and Ant, andVolatile. Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart received an American Book Award. She is the current president of the Poetry Society of America and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hahn is also the winner of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. She currently teaches in the English department at Queens College and resides in New York.

Michelle Whittaker is a poet, composer, and pianist. An alumna of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Stony Brook Southampton, she is the author of a recently published poetry collection, Surge. Whittaker is the winner of a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and the recipient of a Cave Canem fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The Southampton Review, The New Yorker, Xanadu, White Space Project Anthology, and Long Island Quarterly. Whittaker currently teaches at Stony Brook University’s program in Writing and Rhetoric and resides in East Setauket, New York.

On December 6, Writers Speak will be devoted to readings by “the stars of tomorrow:” students currently enrolled in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literature program.

Writers Speak Wednesdays programs are free and open to the public. The evenings begin with a brief reception at 6:30 p.m., followed by readings at 7 p.m., and then a Q&A and book signing.

Stony Brook Southampton is located at 239 Montauk Highway in Southampton. For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit stonybrook.edu/mfa. Writers Speak is also on Facebook as Writers Speak Wednesdays; and Twitter as @WritersSpeakWed.