CBH Talk | Poetry in the Archives: Oral Histories as Inspiration

The archives echo with voices in this National Poetry Month celebration, as the Center for Brooklyn History welcomes five poets, all published by Brooklyn’s historic independent poetry publisher Hanging Loose Press, for an evening that brings poetry and oral history into conversation.

Drawing inspiration from CBH’s rich oral history collections, poets Jiwon Choi, Miguel Coronado, Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, and Rebecca Suzuki will each present a short archival audio clip that resonates with them. After sharing the recording with the audience, each poet will read an original poem in response. As we listen first to voices and then to verse, the past becomes a catalyst for contemporary creative expression.

Between readings, CBH Special Collections and Outreach Librarian Kevina Tidwell will offer brief insights into the featured oral history collections. The evening concludes with a conversation between audience and participants about how poets engage with archives, the ways historical materials spark new work, and the enduring role of independent publishers like Hanging Loose Press.

 

About Hanging Loose Press

For more than half a century, Hanging Loose Press has championed writers often marginalized by mainstream publishing. Founded during the publishing “mimeo revolution” of the 1960s, the first 24 issues of Hanging Loose magazine were produced as mimeographed loose pages in an envelope—a format that gave the press its name. Over the past 60 years, Hanging Loose Press has published 118 magazine issues and more than 250 poetry titles, and for the past decade has partnered with the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY to present the Loose Translation Award. The press’s Founders Award, which publishes an annual first poetry collection, honors the press’s 1966 founders—Ron Schreiber, Emmett Jarrett, and Bob Hershon. This year's award went to Autoexilio.

 

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Participants

Jiwon Choi is a poet, preschool teacher, and urban gardener.  She is the author of three poetry collections. Her most recent book, A Temporary Dwelling, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2024.  She started her Brooklyn community garden’s first poetry reading series, Poets Read in the Garden, to support local writers. She is an editor at Hanging Loose Press.

 

 

Miguel Coronado is a poet and translator based in the Bronx, New York. His debut book of poetry, Autoexilio, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in 2026. He has translated the chapbook Philo(zoo)phical Notes by Oscar Cruz, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2026. His writing has appeared in the Latin American Literary Review, Hanging Loose, Mouse Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Second Factory, Catchwater, A Public Space, and West 10th.

 

 

 

 

 

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.  In 2023, Hahn was named a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and received The Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.  She will serve as New York State Poet from 2025-2027.

 

 

 

D. Nurkse is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently A Country Of  Strangers (a "new and selected"), Love In The Last Days: After Tristan And Iseult, A Night In Brooklyn, The Border Kingdom, Burnt Island, and The Fall, from Alfred Knopf. He's the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Whiting Writers Award, and prizes from The Poetry Foundation and the Tanne Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Brooklyn from 1996 to 2001. His work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Estonian, and other languages. In 2011, a third edition of Voices Over Water, an earlier collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best book of poetry published in the U.K. 

 

 

Rebecca Suzuki is a Queens-based poet, writer, and translator. Her book, When My Mother Is Most Beautiful, was winner of the Loose Translation Prize and published by Hanging Loose Press in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Killing the Buddha, Riverteeth Journal, and other places. She teaches writing at Queens College, CUNY.

 

 

 

Kevina Tidwell is the Special Collections and Outreach Librarian at CBH. In this role she provides reference services and teaches classes on archival research to groups ranging from primary school to college to older adults. She previously worked as an archival producer for documentary films and television. She holds an MLIS from the Pratt School of Information and a BA in American History from Arizona State University.