Sabbatical, Spring 2025

Assistant Professor

English

[image: a painting by my grandmother, June (Chizuko Yamashita) Shimoda, which she made shortly before she passed away (October 8, 2023)]

 

Who, then, will write the history of the bottom, the history of the moss?—Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi

How do you write a history that is both [yours] and [not yours] but an extension of an improbable future? —Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, the Swarm

 

I am a biracial yonsei (4th-gen Japanese American) poet and writer. I have taught writing to students of all ages, from elementary school students just beginning to discover the pleasure and power of transforming their experiences—their joys, dreams, fears, curiosities—into stories, to elders considering the extent of their lives and hoping to make for themselves and their descendants an inhabitable, panoramic record. I have taught at the University of Arizona, the UA Poetry Center, Kaohsiung American School (Taiwan), the University of Montana, Occidental College, Pacific Northwest College of the Arts/Willamette University, and Pima Community College.

All of my classes incorporate, in some form: memory studies, ancestral studies, and creative research methodologies. I generally teach what I, as a writer, am thinking about/trying to figure out in my own writing.

Among the writers/artists whose work I have shared most recently with my students:Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, James Baldwin, Kimiko Hahn, Kiku Hughes, Bhanu Kapil, Elias Khoury, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janice Lee, Mohammad Malas, Janice Mirikitani, Jami Nakamura Lin, Carol Nguyen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Emiko Omori, Leanne Shapton, Sei Shōnagon, Agnès Varda, Q.M. Zhang.

Recent visitors to my classes have included: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Jennifer S. Cheng, Danielle Geller, Elizabeth Ito (creator of City of Ghosts), Bhanu Kapil, Hea-Ream Lee, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Chizu and Emiko Omori, Troy Osaki, Brynn Saito, Kelly Shimoda (my sister), Q.M. Zhang, and my daughter's entire elementary school class.

I am the author of several books of poetry and/or prose. My writing has been published in The Baffler, BOMB Magazine, Harper's, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. My most recent book, The Afterlife Is Letting Go (winner of the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction), is on the memory/forgetting of Japanese American incarceration, and includes the voices/testimonies of 200+ survivors and descendants of the WWII prisons and camps.

Books

The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration, co-editor, with Brynn Saito (poetry, Haymarket Books, 2025)

The Afterlife Is Letting Go (nonfiction, City Lights, 2025). Winner of the Colorado Book Award.

Hydra Medusa (poetry and prose, Nightboat Books, 2023)

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

The Desert (poetry and prose, The Song Cave, 2018)

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

To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader, co-editor, with Thom Donovan (Nightboat Books, 2014)

Portuguese (poetry, Octopus Books/Tin House Books, 2013)

O Bon (poetry, Litmus Press, 2011)

The Girl Without Arms (poetry, Black Ocean, 2011)

The Alps (poetry, Flim Forum Press, 2008) 

The Inland Sea (poetry, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

Courses

Senior Creative Writing Workshop

Beginning Creative Nonfiction Writing

Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing

Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Correspondences: Epistolary Reading & Writing

Asian American Creative Nonfiction/Experimental Writing

Put Your Hand on the Grave: The Art of Creative Research