Kimiko Hahn will judge our 2013 Merida Fellowship Award. The award covers Conference fee ($600) and 7 nights lodging at Hotel Caribe in Merida for the week (total value approx. $1,020).  Please submit 4 poems no more than 6 pages, 12pt Times New Roman type (do not put your name on poem pages), along with the entry Application and the $25 entry fee by check payable to U.S. Poets in Mexico,. Mail to USPiM, P.O .Box 4150, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163.  Entries must be received by August 31st, 2012. The recipient will be announced September 30, 2012. The Fellowship recipient will give a featured half-hour reading. Application click HERE

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton, 2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006); The Artist's Daughter(2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile(Hanging Loose Press, 1998); and The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1995), which received an American Book Award.  Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award; also, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize.  In October 2011, she received the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry for her poetry collection Toxic Flora, the highest literary honor for writers of Asian American descent.  Hahn received a bachelor’s degree in English and East Asian studies with a certificate in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University.  She is a Distinguished Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing and Literary Translation program at CUNY's Queens College, NY.  A podcast of Philip Levine in conversation with Kimiko Hahn can be found at the Pen American Center here