Richard Oyama
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
Stories from This Author
Asian American Literature Forum Response by Richard Oyama
June 17, 2012 • Richard Oyama
“Are there any continuities,” wonders scholar Min Hyoung Song, “between the earlier generation of writers which first raised the banner of an Asian American literature and a later generation of writers which inherited it?” The Asian American Literary Review asked writers to respond to this question for their Spring 2012 issue on “Generations.” Forum Response by Richard Oyama In 1974 I first went to Basement Workshop (BW), an Asian American arts organization in New York’s Chinatown. Though I’d taken creative …