Poetry Festival Program 2026

16TH ANNUAL WESTCHESTER POETRY FESTIVAL FRIDAY, APRIL 10

Program Welcome Darren Wood, The Masters School Poet Introductions Dominika Wrozynski, Hudson Valley Writers Center Readings Samyak Shertok Lauren Camp Phylisha Villanueva Keynote Introduction Darren Wood Keynote Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn Kimiko Hahn is author of eleven collections of poetry, including The Ghost Forest: New & Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2024), which plays with given forms while creating new ones, and, in doing so, honors past writers. Previous books Foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes its title and forms from Basho’s famous journals. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in The American Poetry Review.

In 2023, Kimiko was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, American Book Award and NEA Fellowships.

In her service to the field, she enjoys promoting chapbooks and has created a chapbook archive at the Queens College Library.

She is the New York State poet and will serve in that role until 2027. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Lauren Camp As New Mexico poet laureate (2022–25), Lauren Camp created the New Mexico Epic Poem Project, a community-centered, crowdsourced initiative designed to help people in rural and artsunderserved communities express themselves. Undertaken in partnership with New Mexico Arts, the Project has reached 25 of New Mexico’s 33 counties. Letterpress broadsides of each community poem will be printed, disseminated across the state, and exhibited at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Lauren is the author of eight poetry collections, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as astronomer-in-residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Since this time, Lauren has brought “Poetry Under the Stars” programs to four national parks and monuments, voicing poems about the dark from across time and cultures to audiences in the dark. These readings, followed by a laser-guided constellation tour, are designed to encourage people to slow down, look and listen, and to advocate for preserving our dark skies.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, and has been awarded a Dorset Prize and a New Mexico Book Award. Other honors include finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, Housatonic Book Award, Big Other Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. She has been writer-in-residence at Lowell Observatory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Hedgebrook, Denver Botanic Gardens, Storyknife and The Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center.

Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, Missouri Review and Poem-a-Day. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish.

Samyak Shertok Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award and the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Waxwing, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.

Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University.

Phylisha Villanueva Phylisha Villanueva is a Belizean-American poet, author and educator whose work explores identity, resilience and mysticism. Born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, her storytelling is deeply informed by her Belizean heritage and shaped by her experiences navigating womanhood, motherhood and survival.

Villanueva co-founded The Yonkers Writing Group and The Mirror Project, and launched Literary Lituation, a resource for all things music and poetry in Westchester County. Villanueva is also a proud member of the Jazz and Poetry Choir Collective and the international women’s poetry collective Tesoro.

In January 2024, she was appointed Westchester County’s second poet laureate, becoming the first woman of color to hold the title. In this role, she has continued her work as a teaching artist with ArtsWestchester, hosted open mics at Bethany Arts Center, led poetry workshops at the Westchester County Correctional Facility, and co-curated an exhibition with the Hudson River Museum, where she collaborated with fellow writers to bring fresh perspectives to the museum’s archives and collection.

At the historic swearing-in of Deputy County Executive Ken Jenkins — the first African American to serve in that position — Villanueva read her poem “Hope for Us is a Deep Current.” She has also shared her work at the Nuyorican Poets Café, New York University, John Jay College, Pace University, St. Francis College, the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico Center and the Bahá’í Center.

We gratefully acknowledge Festival organizers Dominika Wrozynski and Darren Wood Past festival organizers Jennifer Franklin, Judy Murphy and Chris Goulian, who paved the way Jessica Sonders, for coordinating the event planning for the festival The Masters School Communications, Maintenance, Security and Technology teams The Village Bookstore in Pleasantville, New York, for making the poets’ books available for purchase The English department for teaching students to read and write poems Head of School Laura Danforth and Head of Upper School Peter Newcomb, for creating the space for this festival at The Masters School The Poetry Festival is supported in part through the Jeanne Kim Workshop in Poetry and Fiction endowed fund, established in 1981 by Drs. Eung Lim and Young In Kim P’81, ’83, in memory of their daughter, Jeanne Kim ’83.

Ongoing funding is supported by Dr. Helen Kim ’81