From DiscoverNikkei.org
Lawson Fusao Inada
Poet (b.1938)
In May of 1942, Lawson Fusao Inada’s family was sent to camps at the Fresno County Fairgrounds. They were later moved to a camp in Arkansas and eventually interred at a camp in Colorado. Lawson Inada was one of the youngest Japanese-Americans to live in the internment camps during World War II. Since then, those experiences have been a catalyst for much of his poetry.
With the publication of Before the War, Inada was the first Asian American to publish a collection of poems with a major New York publishing house. According to his biography on Oregon Poet Laureate, "Inada has been recognized by the President of the United States, appearing at the White House in ‘A Salute to Poetry and American Poets.’ He is a winner of the Governor’s Arts Award (1997), the Oregon Book Award (for Drawing the Line, 1997), and the Pushcart Prize (1996) for poetry."
His poetry volume Legends from Camp (1992) received the American Book Award and was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. A number of the poems in this collection are reflections and explorations of his experience in camp—his reactions then and the continued effect of that experience on him today. In addition to these memories, jazz music is also a significant influence in Inada's poems. In fact, Legends from Camp includes poems that are tributes to jazz greats like Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, and others.
Lawson Inada has been a professor of writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland where he currently resides in Oregon with his family.
Sources:
- Modern American Poetry
- Modern American Poetry
- Oregon Poet Laureate
- Memoirs of Lawson Fusao Inada
- www.writersontheedge.org
- Profile: compiled and prepared by Cary Nelson and Juliana Chang, University of Illinois; part of the on-line companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).
- Paul P. Reuben, "Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century - Lawson Fusao Inada (1938 - )". In: PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide.
- Bibliography of works by and about Inada.
- "To prepare for the departure to the internment camps, Inada and his family had to get rid of 'extra baggage' because they would be taken from their homes for an indefinite amount of time. This included, pets and any mobile object, because U. S. soldiers had the right to enter any Japanese-American home (and do virtualy whatever they wished). In Inada's poem, 'III. The legend of Lost Boy,' he describes how their identity was taken away."