Jeffrey Angles is an Associate Professor of Japanese and translation studies whose translations of leading contemporary Japanese poets have earned the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the PEN Club of America Translation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, and his translations include Tada Chimako’s Forest of Eyes, Takahashi Mutsuo’s Intimate Worlds Enclosed, Hiromi Itō’s Killing Kanoko, and Arai Takako’s Soul Dance.

Updated May 2012 

Kandice Chuh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she is also affiliated with the American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program. The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique , she is currently working on a book project titled “The Difference Aesthetics Makes.”

Updated February 2010

April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971, and moved to the United States seven years later. Her poems have most recently appeared in Artful Dodge, Borderland: Texas Quarterly Review, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and held a writers residency at VCCA. She currently works as the readings coordinator at the NYU Creative Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn.

Updated April 2010

VELINA HASU HOUSTON has written over thirty plays, including sixteen commissions, in a career that began at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club with her seminal work Tea. Her plays are presented internationally throughout Asia, as well as in the U.S., Canada, Greece, Croatia, and Australia. The recipient of many honors, Houston writes opera, essays, television, film, and poetry. She is a member of the Dramatists’ Guild, Writers Guild of America-West, League of Professional Theatre Women, and Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. She serves on the U.S. Department of State’s U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange. At the USC School of Theatre, she is founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing Program. She is also Professor of Theatre, Associate Dean of Faculty, Director of Dramatic Writing, and Resident Playwright. Her work is archived at the Library of Congress Huntington Library. 

Updated June 2012 

(Photograph by Ken Matsui) 

Hiromi Itō is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan.  In the 1980s, she wrote a series of collections about sexuality, childbirth, and women’s bodies in such dramatically new and frank ways that she is often credited with revolutionizing postwar Japanese poetry.  Since she moved to the U.S., her work has focused on migration and the psychological effects of linguistic and cultural alienation.  She is the author of over ten collections of poetry, including Sōmoku no sora, winner of the Gendai Shi Techo Prize, and Kawara arekusa, winner of the Takami Jun Award; numerous essay collections and translations; and several novellas and novels, including Ranīnya, winner of the Noma Literary Prize, and Toge-nuki: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi, winner of the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize and the Izumi Shikibu Prize.  Itō’s first poetry collection translated into English is Killing Kanoko. 

Updated July 2012

(Photographed by Hirayama Toshio)

Michelle Har Kim received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California.  Her dissertation, "Antipodes of Asian American Literature: Heterolingualism and the Asian Americas" (2012), explores a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in the Americas.

Updated September 2012

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935 to Japanese-Canadian parents. During World War II, Joy and her family were forced to move to Slocan, British Columbia, an injustice Ms. Kogawa addresses in her 1981 novel Obasan. She has worked to educate Canadians about the history of Japanese Canadians and was active in the fight for official governmental redress. Ms. Kogawa studied at the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan. Her most recent poetic publication is A Garden of Anchors. The long poem A Song of Lilith, published in 2000 with art by Lilian Broca, retells the story of Lilith, the mythical first partner to Adam. In 1986 Ms. Kogawa was made a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2006 she was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2010 the Japanese government honored Ms. Kogawa with the Order of the Rising Sun "for her contribution to the understanding and preservation of Japanese Canadian history.” Ms. Kogawa currently lives in Toronto.

Updated July 2013

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and an American father. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Studies. Picking Bones from Ash, published by Graywolf, is her first novel.

Updated February 2010

David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. His memoir Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year. His second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way, won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. His most recent work is the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire.

Updated May 2010

Tyrone Nagai received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. His work has appeared in Fiction International, The Strip, New Verse News, and Armageddon Buffet.

Updated February 2011

Richard Oyama has a Master’s degree in English, Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.  His work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues (University of Georgia Press, 1987), Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, and other small literary magazines and small-press books.  The Country They Know (Neuma Books, 2005) is his first collection of poetry. 

He has taught English and Ethnic Studies at the California College of Arts, University of California, Berkeley, University of New Mexico, San Francisco Art Institute, and California State University, Hayward.  From 1974 to 79 he was coordinator of the writers workshop of Basement Workshop, an Asian American arts organization in New York's Chinatown.  He is currently working on a second volume of poetry and his first novel, The Orphaned.

Updated June 2012 

Anna K. Stahl is the daughter of Mr and Mrs Stahl, a mixed-race couple, half Caucasian and half Japanese. Anna is a fiction writer and a literature/writing professor based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and writing in the Spanish language. Her fiction and analytical essays often explore cross-cultural experiences; her work is recognized as a new voice for this theme in the Spanish language. She is married to a South American, and they have a young daughter who continues (and indeed expands) the multicultural dynamic.

Updated April 2012

Amy Uyematsu was a sansei poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She had six published collections, including her most recent, That Blue Trickster Time. Her first poetry collection, 30 Miles from J-Town, won the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Active in Asian American Studies when it first emerged in the late 60s, she was co-editor of the widely-used UCLA anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader. Her essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (1969), has appeared in numerous publications.

Amy was a poetry editor of Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California (2000). In 2012 Amy was recognized by the Friends of the Little Tokyo Branch Library for her writing contributions to the Japanese American community. Amy taught high school math for LA Unified Schools for 32 years. She has also taught creative writing classes for the Little Tokyo Service Center. She passed away in June 2023.

Updated December 2023