Poet Kimiko Hahn and Matt Brogan, Executive Director of the Poetry Society, will lead a walking tour of the Poetry Society’s new public art project in Brooklyn, featuring the haiku of Richard Wright. Seeing Into Tomorrow transforms Wright’s poems into large-scale installations, turning Brooklyn walls into sites of inspired language, sparkling wonder, and new connections.
The tour will begin at the Shake Shack in Willoughby Plaza and wind its way through Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene, visiting each installation and culminating at the home where Wright wrote his famous novel Native Son. The tour will explore Wright’s life in Brooklyn and the story behind this public art project; it will also include a reading of his poems at the site of one of the installations.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poems, including: Foreign Bodies (W. W. Norton, 2020); Brain Fever (2014), and Toxic Flora (2010), and The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NY Foundation for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Matt Brogan is the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America. He has previously served as Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures and Program Director of the Academy of American Poets and Nextbook. His poems and fiction have appeared in the Antioch Review, Brooklyn Rail, Columbia, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, Verse, and other literary magazines. He is the editor of This Place (Hatje Cantz, 2019).
Distance 1.3 miles.
Limit 20 people.
Registration required. To register email: info@poetrysociety.org.
Additional details will be emailed to registrants.
Seeing Into Tomorrow is made possible by a grant from Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund, a partnership with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and DUMBO Improvement District as part of New York State's Downtown Revitalization Initiative.
THIS IS AN OFFICIAL 2021 BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL BOOKEND EVENT.
