The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate and the New School invite you to a celebration of the life and work of Kenneth Koch, poet, teacher, playwright, fiction writer, and collaborator with artists. Koch, who taught at The New School from 1958 to 1966, is a major poet of New York – alongside his friends John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – and a teacher who inspired generations of young writers. Participants include film director Jim Jarmusch, critic Lucy Sante, artists Jim Dine and Alex Katz, legendary editor of Paris Review Maxine Groffsky, essayist Phillip Lopate, and poets Ron Padgett, Charles North, Tony Towle, John Keene, and Jeffrey Harrison. Poet and editor Jordan Davis will host the event, with a general introduction by Robert Polito of The New School.

During his lifetime, Koch published more than a dozen collections of poems including Thank You, The Pleasures of Peace, The Art of Love, Days and Nights, One Train, and New Addresses. Among his posthumous volumes are Collected Poems, On the Edge: Collected Long Poems, The Banquet: Collected Plays and The Collected Fiction of Kenneth Koch. He is also the author of two trailblazing books on teaching writing to children, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch received the Library of Congress’ Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, and was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Koch’s teaching career in New York, beginning with three years at Brooklyn College and nine years at the New School, concluded at Columbia, where he taught from 1959 until 2002.