About

Yuri Kageyama is a poet, writer and journalist of bilingual and bicultural upbringing, born in Japan and growing up in Maryland, Tokyo and Alabama.

Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in many literary publications, including “Y’Bird,” “Greenfield Review,” “San Francisco Stories,” “On a Bed of Rice,” “Breaking Silence: an Anthology of Asian American Poets,” “POW WOW: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience _ Short Fiction from Then to Now,” “Other Side River,” “Beyond Rice,” “Bridge, ” “Yellow Silk,” “Stories We Hold Secret,” “KONCH,” “MultiAmerica” and “Obras.”

She has two books The New and Selected Yuri: Writing From Peeling Till Now (Ishmael Reed Publishing Co.) and Peeling (I. Reed Press).

Her film Talking Taiko (March 2010), directed by Yoshiaki Tago, documents her readings and thoughts on writing, art and life.

She has read with Ishmael Reed, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Eric Kamau Gravatt, Geraldine Kudaka, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Winchester Nii Tete, Russel Baba, Seamus Heaney, Sachiko Yoshihara, Yumi Miyagishima, Shozu Ben, Keiji Kubo, Teruyuki and Haruna Kawabata, Takenari Shibata, Abel Coelho, Yuri Matsueda and many other artists. She has collaborated in readings with music, visual art and dance, including a reading at an Isamu Noguchi exhibit at the San Francisco Musem of Modern Art.

Yuri Kageyama is compiling with Isao Tokuhashi an oral history of Yoichi Watanabe, composer, leader and founder of Amanojaku, a Tokyo taiko group, where her son Isaku Kageyama is a drummer.

She has translated works by poet Hiromi Ito and the words of dancer Suzushi Hanayagi for Robert Wilson’s performance piece “KOOL _ Dancing in My Mind.” Her poetry, translated into Japanese, is featured in a 1985 anthology of Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian poetry published by Doyo Bijutsusha. She has a 1993 book in Japanese co-written with Hamao Yokota on the Japanese workplace.

She is a magna cum laude graduate of Cornell University and holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Tokyo.