he/him

Assistant Professor

English

She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live. Says to herself if she would write without ceasing. To herself if by writing she could abolish real time. She would live. If she could display it before her and becomes its voyeur. —Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

I am a biracial yonsei (4th-generation) Japanese American poet, writer, and teacher of writing. I have taught writing to students of all ages, from elementary school students just beginning to discover the pleasure and the power of transforming their experiences—their joys, dreams, fears, curiosities—into stories, to elders considering the extent of their lives and wanting to make of their memories a panorama of transferable meaning. I have taught at the University of Arizona, Kaohsiung American School (Taiwan), the University of Montana, Occidental College, Pacific Northwest College of the Arts/Willamette University, Pima Community College/Upward Bound. As a professor of creative writing—and as a facilitator of creative writing workshops—I think often about my own experience as a student in the workshop classroom: about what made me feel included and inspired, and also about what made me feel alienated and lost. And I try, as best as I can, to reanimate the best of those experiences—and those spaces—while redeeming, hopefully, the worst of them. 

Among the writers I am always re/reading are: Etel Adnan, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Matsuo Basho, Aimé Césaire, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Don Mee Choi, Mahmoud Darwish, Dot Devota, Marguerite Duras, Saidiya Hartman, Bhanu Kapil, Yasunari Kawabata, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Malika Mokeddem, Toni Morrison, Scholastique Mukasonga, Christina Sharpe, Simone Weil, all of whom I carry with me into the classroom, some of whom I teach there. 

I am currently writing a book of nonfiction (to be published by City Lights) on the afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, which means also a book on anti-Asian racism, erasure, ghosts, haunting, memorialization, migrant detention, nostalgia, pilgrimage, poetry, postmemory, protest, ruins, silence, storytelling, transgenerational trauma, white supremacy, and the wind.

Books

Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, forthcoming in 2023)

The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019). Winner of the PEN Open Book Award.

The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018)

Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015). Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award.

Portuguese (Octopus Books/Tin House Books, 2013)

O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011)

The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011)

The Alps (Flim Forum Press, 2008) 

Regular Classes

Beginning Creative Nonfiction Writing

Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing

Correspondences: Epistolary Reading & Writing

Literature of Japanese American Incarceration