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The Asian American Literary Review


Feb. 7, 2010 - Aug. 12, 2012

The Asian American Literary Review is a space for writers who consider the designation “Asian American” a fruitful starting point for artistic vision and community. In showcasing the work of established and emerging writers, the journal aims to incubate dialogues and, just as importantly, open those dialogues to regional, national, and international audiences of all constituencies. It selects work that is, as Marianne Moore once put it, “an expression of our needs…[and] feeling, modified by the writer’s moral and technical insights.”

Published biannually, AALR features fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, comic art, interviews, and book reviews. Discover Nikkei will feature selected stories from their issues.

Visit their website for more information and to subscribe to the publication: www.asianamericanliteraryreview.org


Stories from this series

Thumbnail for Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 2
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Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 2

Aug. 12, 2012 • Hiromi Itō

Read Jeffrey Angles’ short essay about Wild Grass on the Riverbank >>  Mother Leads Us to the Wasteland Where We Settle Down Mother led us along and we got on boardWe got on and off againBoarding cars and busses and planesThen more buses and trains and cars I was beginning to think that life would go on forever, it would go on forever, but one day it stopped all of the sudden, that day wasn’t especially different from all the others …

Thumbnail for Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 1
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Poems by Hiromi Itō -- from Wild Grass on the Riverbank - Part 1

Aug. 5, 2012 • Hiromi Itō

Read Jeffrey Angles’ short essay about Wild Grass on the Riverbank >>  Mother Leads Us on Board Mother led us along And we got on board We got on, got off, then on againWe boarded cars and bussesWe boarded planes Then more buses and trains and cars The place where we arrived was a building full of muffled voices, it had a cold corridor where people had gathered in droves, they were all looking confused, they were all looking confused as they didn’t …

Thumbnail for Hiromi Itō - from Wild Grass on the Riverbank
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Hiromi Itō - from Wild Grass on the Riverbank

July 29, 2012 • Jeffrey Angles

Born in Tokyo in 1955, Itō Hiromi is one of the most important women poets of contemporary Japan. Itō rose to prominence in the 1980s with a series of dramatic collections of poetry that described sexuality, pregnancy, and feminine erotic desire in dramatically direct language. Her willingness to deal with touchy subjects such as post-partum depression, infanticide, and queer sexual desire took Japan—a nation more used to images of women as proud wives, mothers, and quiet caregivers—by surprise and earned …

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Poems by Amy Uyematsu

July 22, 2012 • Amy Uyematsu

Orchid Season in Mr. Ikeda’s Garden : The “Welcome” sign still hangs abovehis garden gate though koi no longer swimin the emptied pondand hummingbirdsdo not return at spring some say the beesare disappearing too but Mr. Ikeda’s orchidscan still fill a greenhouse :  White with its bold yellow throat The palest pink with violet veins Jungle green freckled withginger and maroon What could be better than choosingthe most gorgeous Or be lost in so much luxurious profusion : In Japanese legend, life’s bountyfor a …

Thumbnail for Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 3
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Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 3

July 15, 2012 • Anna K. Stahl

Read part 2 >> Now, to return to the issue posed in this forum’s prompt: in my case, I must try to find an instance in which both a generational difference and a national-cultural one revealed their criteria and influence. And there was a specific instance, an event I participated in several years ago, in 2004, for the “Japan Theme Day” at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair. I was invited together with an Argentine Nisei, Maximiliano Matayoshi, a talented young …

Thumbnail for Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 2
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Asian American Literature Forum Response by Anna Kazumi Stahl - Part 2

July 8, 2012 • Anna K. Stahl

Read part 1 >> To get back to the prompt this forum is based on, I answer that I do see a parallelism between those expansions in an Asian American literature’s aesthetic/stylistic reach and that 1980s Presidential apology to Japanese Americans (although those $20,000 checks remain a bit of a thorn, and most pooled the money for monuments and programs that would keep the memory of those ten internment camps alive for future generations). Those were the kinds of things that …

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Authors in This Series

Jeffrey Angles is an Associate Professor of Japanese and translation studies whose translations of leading contemporary Japanese poets have earned the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the PEN Club of America Translation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Grant. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, and his translations include Tada Chimako’s Forest of Eyes, Takahashi Mutsuo’s Intimate Worlds Enclosed, Hiromi Itō’s Killing Kanoko, and Arai Takako’s Soul Dance.


Updated May 2012 

 


Kandice Chuh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she is also affiliated with the American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Program. The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique , she is currently working on a book project titled “The Difference Aesthetics Makes.”

Updated February 2010


April Naoko Heck was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971, and moved to the United States seven years later. Her poems have most recently appeared in Artful Dodge, Borderland: Texas Quarterly Review, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award and held a writers residency at VCCA. She currently works as the readings coordinator at the NYU Creative Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn.

Updated April 2010


VELINA HASU HOUSTON has written over thirty plays, including sixteen commissions, in a career that began at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club with her seminal work Tea. Her plays are presented internationally throughout Asia, as well as in the U.S., Canada, Greece, Croatia, and Australia. The recipient of many honors, Houston writes opera, essays, television, film, and poetry. She is a member of the Dramatists’ Guild, Writers Guild of America-West, League of Professional Theatre Women, and Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. She serves on the U.S. Department of State’s U.S.-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange. At the USC School of Theatre, she is founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing Program. She is also Professor of Theatre, Associate Dean of Faculty, Director of Dramatic Writing, and Resident Playwright. Her work is archived at the Library of Congress Huntington Library. 

Updated June 2012 

(Photograph by Ken Matsui) 


Hiromi Itō is one of the most important poets of contemporary Japan.  In the 1980s, she wrote a series of collections about sexuality, childbirth, and women’s bodies in such dramatically new and frank ways that she is often credited with revolutionizing postwar Japanese poetry.  Since she moved to the U.S., her work has focused on migration and the psychological effects of linguistic and cultural alienation.  She is the author of over ten collections of poetry, including Sōmoku no sora, winner of the Gendai Shi Techo Prize, and Kawara arekusa, winner of the Takami Jun Award; numerous essay collections and translations; and several novellas and novels, including Ranīnya, winner of the Noma Literary Prize, and Toge-nuki: Shin Sugamo Jizō engi, winner of the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize and the Izumi Shikibu Prize.  Itō’s first poetry collection translated into English is Killing Kanoko

Updated July 2012

(Photographed by Hirayama Toshio)


Michelle Har Kim received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California.  Her dissertation, "Antipodes of Asian American Literature: Heterolingualism and the Asian Americas" (2012), explores a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in the Americas.

Updated September 2012


Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935 to Japanese-Canadian parents. During World War II, Joy and her family were forced to move to Slocan, British Columbia, an injustice Ms. Kogawa addresses in her 1981 novel Obasan. She has worked to educate Canadians about the history of Japanese Canadians and was active in the fight for official governmental redress. Ms. Kogawa studied at the University of Alberta and the University of Saskatchewan. Her most recent poetic publication is A Garden of Anchors. The long poem A Song of Lilith, published in 2000 with art by Lilian Broca, retells the story of Lilith, the mythical first partner to Adam. In 1986 Ms. Kogawa was made a Member of the Order of Canada, and in 2006 she was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2010 the Japanese government honored Ms. Kogawa with the Order of the Rising Sun "for her contribution to the understanding and preservation of Japanese Canadian history.” Ms. Kogawa currently lives in Toronto.

Updated July 2013


Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and an American father. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Studies. Picking Bones from Ash, published by Graywolf, is her first novel.

Updated February 2010


David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. His memoir Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year. His second book of poetry, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way, won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. His most recent work is the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire.

Updated May 2010


Tyrone Nagai received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. His work has appeared in Fiction International, The Strip, New Verse News, and Armageddon Buffet.

Updated February 2011


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 


Anna K. Stahl is the daughter of Mr and Mrs Stahl, a mixed-race couple, half Caucasian and half Japanese. Anna is a fiction writer and a literature/writing professor based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and writing in the Spanish language. Her fiction and analytical essays often explore cross-cultural experiences; her work is recognized as a new voice for this theme in the Spanish language. She is married to a South American, and they have a young daughter who continues (and indeed expands) the multicultural dynamic.

Updated April 2012


Amy Uyematsu was a sansei poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She had six published collections, including her most recent, That Blue Trickster Time. Her first poetry collection, 30 Miles from J-Town, won the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Active in Asian American Studies when it first emerged in the late 60s, she was co-editor of the widely-used UCLA anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader. Her essay, “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (1969), has appeared in numerous publications.

Amy was a poetry editor of Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California (2000). In 2012 Amy was recognized by the Friends of the Little Tokyo Branch Library for her writing contributions to the Japanese American community. Amy taught high school math for LA Unified Schools for 32 years. She has also taught creative writing classes for the Little Tokyo Service Center. She passed away in June 2023.

Updated December 2023

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