SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — Kim Thai is the current Sullivan County Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Houston, TX, and moved to New York City before coming to Sullivan County with her wife about five years ago. She was a journalist and a documentarian, work she still does remotely today on a project basis.

Although she read poetry earlier, it wasn’t until she was in college that she first thought about writing poetry. “That was when I saw the poet Louise Glick read her poems out loud,” she said. “It shook me to the core.”

She didn’t realize at the time that she was already writing poetry. “People were telling me that the personal essays I wrote were very lyrical, very musical and sounded like poetry,” she recalled. Thai thought that was because she was reading so much poetry, it was infusing the way she wrote.

She found that poetry was “the most direct way to cut through the noise in my life.” When she wrote an essay and even when she worked as a journalist, she said, she would question herself. “Is this the right structure? Am I interviewing the right person? Am I saying the thing that I want to say?”

She explained, “I don’t have those same expectations with poetry. It’s just a container for me to pour out whatever is present in me. So my pieces tend to be very raw in that way.”

Her poems also tend to be very personal. “I’m exploring ‘home’ in the sense of belonging,” she said. “I think that’s been something I’ve always been exploring.” Her poem, which she titled “Home,” is about how she found a home in Sullivan County.

It was one of the poems she read to the audience during the poet laureate inauguration ceremony, which took place on May 15 on the outdoor stage of Monticello’s Ethelbert B. Crawford Public Library.

Thai said she only learned that Sullivan County has a poet laureate when she was invited to a poetry reading by Kevin Graham, who was the poet laureate at the time. “It was such a wonderful experience,” she recalled.

The Sullivan County poet laureate is chosen through the Poet Laureate Project, which is conducted by the Sullivan Public Library Alliance (SUPLA). Applicants must live in Sullivan County and have a body of work. If chosen, he or she must be available to serve a term of at least one year.

Thai said she decided to apply. She submitted five poems as samples of her work, along with a poem specifically about Sullivan County and her relationship to it. She was interviewed by the panel of judges after becoming one of the three finalists, and was notified later that she would be the next poet laureate. She will serve a term of two years.

As poet laureate, Thai is the literary ambassador for Sullivan County and is tasked with encouraging the reading and writing of poetry by the county’s adults and children. Thai anticipates doing this in several ways. “I love the idea of engaging with our adult population through an open mic regularly throughout the county.”

She referred to Kevin Graham’s success with his Zoom group and hopes to continue that. “I’m also really interested and invested in trying to engage our families in some way.” She said she would like poetry to be a connector for parents and their kids to be closer, to have fun and to do things together.  “And being able to do some sort of school outreach would be awesome,” she concluded.

Her hope for ending her term as poet laureate would be to create an anthology of everyone’s poems, if people are willing to provide them. “I just think it would be awesome to have the poem of someone who’s retired on one page and then the poem of someone from first grade on the next, just to get the breadth of the poems that are created during this two-year term.”