Literary Arts

Barry Broadfoot

Barry Broadfoot was a noted Canadian oral historian, famous for his book Ten Lost Years which shares oral histories of the Great Depression. Among his many other works is the book Years of Sorrow, Years of Shame, a collection of anonymous oral histories about the Japanese Canadian internment. It was published in 1978, not long […]

Pat Adachi

Pat Adachi is the author of Asahi: A Legend in Baseball (1992), the book widely credited as sparking a popular revival of interest in the prewar Japanese Canadian Vancouver baseball team, the Asahi. Although she did not consider herself a writer, Adachi had been a fan of the Asahi as a young girl in Vancouver, […]

Tamai Kobayashi

Tamai Kobayashi is a Toronto-based writer of short stories, poetry, screenplays, and a novel, Prairie Ostrich. Prairie Ostrich, which follows eight-year-old Egg Murakami and her family on their ostrich farm in rural southern Alberta, has been called an ‘exquisitely crafted story’ with ‘insights into childhood, loss, cruelty and triumph’. Prairie Ostrich was listed by the […]

David Kenji Fujino

David Fujino was a multidisciplinary Sansei artist who wrote poetry in the form of concrete visual poetry; he was also an actor and a writer of reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. Born in the internment camp of Greenwood, Fujino became a fixture of the Toronto Japanese Canadian community and the arts scene. In the 1970s, […]

Noriko Kim Kobayashi

Noriko Kobayashi is a musician. She earned a M.A. degree in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia, in addition to a B.A. in Music and Psychology from U.B.C. She also earned a music degree from Capilano College in classical voice studies and is also a published author on the subject of taiko. Prior to […]

Ellen Anderson

Ayako Ellen Yamasaki Anderson is an artist, writer, and social activist. She was born in 1943, in Sandon, BC. Sandon was an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the war. Ellen is considered a sansei third generation Japanese-Canadian but her great grandmother was actually a first generation Issei from Japan. Ellen trained as a visual […]

Stanley Fukawa

Stanley Toshinori Fukawa is a Nisei sociologist, community organizer, historian and writer. He organized the Mid-Island Japanese Canadian Society, affectionately called the ‘Seven Potatoes’ (nana imo) Society and served as the writer/editor/publisher of their newsletter. He also wrote numerous articles for and served on the editorial committee of Nikkei Images, the journal of the Nikkei […]

Masako Fukawa

Masako Fukawa (nee Shinde) is a Sansei educator and writer. Born in Prince Rupert BC, she was removed from Steveston and relocated to the ghost town of Greenwood. Returned to Steveston in 1951, attended UBC, the University of Michigan, University of Victoria and taught in Japan and in Nanaimo. She developed resources for teachers and […]

Warabe Aska

Warabe Aska is a painter and children’s book illustrator.

Teruko Kobayashi

Teruko ‘Terry’ Kobayashi was an art historian who wrote about Canadian folk arts. Born in British Columbia, she received her BA from the University of Toronto in 1966, and also attended the Ontario College of Education. She co-authored two books on folk art and furniture, published a number of articles in the 1970s and 1980s, […]

Annie Koyama

Annie Koyama is a publisher and founder of the Toronto-based Koyama Press. After working in graphic arts, set painting, and film, Koyama found herself in advertising making commercials. After a surviving a terminal diagnosis, she decided to dedicate her time and resources to supporting primarily emerging artists. In 2007, she published Koyama Press’s first book, […]

Mitch Miyagawa

Mitch Miyagawa is a filmmaker and writer known for his 2012 documentary A Sorry State. A Sorry State won the Writers’ Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award for Documentary in 2013. It was commissioned by TVO and Knowledge Network. His play The Plum Tree was produced several times across western Canada, as well as a public […]

Rick Shiomi

Rick Shiomi is a Toronto-born theatre artist now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a leader in early Asian Canadian theatre movement in the 1980s. He credits his time spent in Vancouver in the 1970s, working with the Powell Street Festival in its early years, and later with the Redress movement, as what gave him the […]

Kevin Irie

Kevin Irie is a poet and the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Viewing Tom Thomson, A Minority Report, published in 2012. He has been a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award, the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, and the ARC Poem of the Year, among others, and won Ricepaper magazine’s […]

Gerry Shikatani

Gerry Shikatani is a poet, food critic, and interdisciplinary artist. Born and raised in Toronto, he has lived in Montreal and Paris, France, and travelled extensively in Europe and more recently Japan. His literary works include AQUEDUCT: poems and texts from Europe, and co-editing Paper Doors (1981), an anthology of Japanese Canadian poetry, with David […]