Poetry Grant Winners to Read
News comes from the Shelter Island Library that the Bliss Morehead Grant Committee has announced the 2024 winners of poetry grants. The theme of this year's competition was "hope and grace."
Emily O'Reilly of Montauk took first place, earning $1,000 for her poem "Legacy," which she will read on Friday at 7 p.m. at the library, joined by the winners of honorable mentions, Edward Brennan and Bethany Moore, both of Shelter Island, and Ella Carriero of Remsenburg.
Bliss Morehead was a Shelter Island poet who established the Shelter Island Poetry Project, which promotes the work of up-and-coming poets and their unpublished work.
Kimiko Hahn at the White House
Kimiko Hahn, a Queens College English professor who lives part time in Mattituck, spoke and read her poetry at the White House on April 10 for National Poetry Month, flanked at the lectern by the first lady, Jill Biden, and Kishida Yuko, the wife of the Japanese prime minister. The occasion hailed the two countries' emphasis on art and education. A group of high school students spoke and read in both languages.
Ms. Hahn's 2020 collection of poems, "Foreign Bodies," from W.W. Norton, was called peppered with magical thinking and the invocation of talismans in a review in The Star. Her forthcoming collection, "The Ghost Forest," is due out in October. Ms. Hahn, who also led a poetry workshop with the students at the White House, mentioned that her grandfather had been a farm worker in the Hiroshima Prefecture.