Literary Arts

Kaori Kasai

Kaori Kasai (Kao), a.k.a. Sleepless Kao, is an artist-in-motion who graduated from art school (Setsu Mode Seminar) in Tokyo, specializing in fashion illustration. Since then, she travelled to live and work in San Francisco, Hong Kong, and now Vancouver. She creates her own world of eccentric creatures and personalities which bloom into the void: gigantic […]

Donna Wuest

Donna Yoshitake Wuest has been a professional writer/author for more than 40 years. Born in Vernon, BC, she grew up on the Coldstream Ranch where her parents worked primarily in the orchards. Decades after moving away from the ranch, she researched and wrote Coldstream The Ranch Where It All Began (published by Harbour Publishing). She […]

Chuck Tasaka

Chuck Tasaka was born in Midway, B.C. in 1945, and was given the name Hachiro. Baptized as Charles in 1951, he goes by the present name. He received all of his schooling in Greenwood, B.C., having graduated in 1963. Chuck attended King Edward Adult Education grade 13, and in 1968, graduated from UBC with a […]

Sachiko Murakami

Sachiko Murakami is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Render (Arsenal Pulp Press 2020), a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. As a literary worker, she has edited poetry, taught creative writing, worked for trade organizations, hosted reading series, sat on juries, and judged prizes. She lives in Toronto.

Wasteland Gardens

Wasteland Gardens: the Japanese Canadian Internment in Canada is a two-part, one-hour radio documentary about the Japanese Canadian Internment presented on the CBC Radio show, Ideas. Japanese Canadian artists contributing to this documentary, produced by Karen Levine (the award winning playwright and writer of Hana’s Suitcase) were Terry Watada (narrator and script consultant), Takeo Yamashiro […]

George Yamada

George Kiyoshi Yamada was the publisher and editor of the Rikka* newsletter, an important publication for the Japanese Canadian community in Toronto, for almost two decades. Yamada was born in Nebraska, and studied at San Francisco State College and Mexico City College. In 1941, he was drafted by the United States army, and declared himself […]

Linz Kenyon

Lindsay ‘Linz’ Kenyon is a writer, composer, actor, and musician. He has released four albums, published poems and stories, acted in film, theatre, and radio, and written many plays. Kenyon grew up on a cattle ranch in British Columbia, and has used his wrangling skills in a few theatre productions. He has written, performed, and […]

David Aylward

David Aylward is a literary translator of Japanese poetry who translated the haiku and tanka of Issei and Nisei poets who appeared in paper doors: an anthology of Japanese-Canadian poetry (Coach House, 1981).

Jess

‘Jess’ is the pen name of a Nisei who wished to remain anonymous when he wrote his autobiography, the self-published Ignomy. Ignomy is a heart-wrenching portrait of an angry and bitter Nisei that follows his life from childhood through to the internment experience. Ignomy is a raw early account of a survivor of the Japanese […]

Diana Morita Cole

Diana Morita Cole received the 2017 Richard Carver Award for Emerging Artists for her book, Sideways: Memoir of a Misfit, which tells of her birth behind barbed wires in a Minidoka incarceration site. Cole grew up in a ghetto on the Near North Side of Chicago, where she was coddled by her 80-year-old grandfather, who […]

Rachel Greenaway

R.M. GREENAWAY lives in Nelson, BC. She has written the acclaimed six-book BC Blues crime series and several short stories, and is now contemplating a new series. Check out her work or get in touch through rmgreenaway.com.

Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer

Ann-Lee and Gordon Switzer are the authors of Gateway to Promise: Canada’s First Japanese Community, and Sakura in Stone: Victoria’s Japanese Legacy. A husband and wife historian team, they became interested in the prewar Japanese Canadian community in Victoria after becoming involved in the local Japanese Canadian community and being asked to write about the […]

Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto is a writer and author of Chorus of Mushrooms, The Kappa Child, Hopeful Monsters, for adults, and The Water of Possibility, Half World, and Darkest Light for youth. She co-wrote Wait Until Late Afternoon (poetry) with David Bateman. Showa Shinzan, an NFB animated short directed by Alison Reiko Loader, was co-written with Jesse […]

Helen Koyama

Helen Koyama is a Sansei writer based in Toronto. Her poetry was published in the landmark Asian Canadian anthology Inalienable Rice in 1979, and she also did illustrations for Rikka and Ricepaper magazines. She has worked in the Japanese Canadian community in Toronto, including for The New Canadian, which also published her poetry. She currently […]

Carolyn Nakagawa

Carolyn Nakagawa is a poet and playwright whose work has appeared in theatres around Greater Vancouver and in various literary journals across Canada, including Ricepaper, Room, EVENT, and CV2. She was a finalist for the Malahat Review’s 2017 Open Season contest in the poetry category. Born and raised in the suburbs of Vancouver, Carolyn studied […]