Literary Arts

Kerri Sakamoto

Kerri Sakamoto is a novelist, screenplay writer, and art critic. Born in Toronto, she studied English and French at the University of Toronto, after which time she worked a variety of jobs, many in libraries, before moving to New York for graduate school. The Electrical Field, her award-winning first novel, looks at the Japanese Canadian […]

Sally Ito

Sally Ito is a writer and translator, born and raised in Taber, Alberta. She has written three books of poetry – Frogs in the Rain Barrel (Nightwood Editions, 1995), Season of Mercy (Nightwood Editions, 1999), and Alert to Glory (Turnstone Press, 2011), and a collection of short stories titled Floating Shore (Mercury Press, 1998). She […]

Emiko Morita

Emiko Morita is a third-generation mixed-heritage Japanese Canadian arts administrator and from 2015 – 2024, the Executive Director of the Powell Street Festival in Vancouver, the largest Japanese Canadian arts and cultural festival in Canada. Previously, she worked in the publishing industry as the marketing director at Douglas & McIntyre, leading marketing campaigns for national […]

Roy K. Kiyooka

One of the first Japanese Canadian artists to achieve prominence on a national and international scale, Roy Kiyooka began his art practice as a painter, later turned his focus to poetry and photography, and engaged in a variety of trans-disciplinary, experimental, and community-building work in the Canadian arts scene. A Nisei, Kiyooka was born in […]

Daphne Marlatt

Daphne Marlatt is a writer who has published more than twenty books that are hybrid forms of poetry, autobiography, prose, travelogue, essay, theory, historical fiction, history, journal, theory, and manifesto. She was born in 1942 to British expatriates and spent her early childhood in Australia and Malaysia. Her family immigrated to Canada when she was […]

Muriel Kitagawa

Tsukiye Muriel (nee Fujiwara) Kitagawa was born in Vancouver on April 3, 1912 and was raised primarily in New Westminster. She graduated from Duke of Connaught High School and briefly attended UBC. Working with other Nisei anxious about their futures as full-fledged Canadians with the right to vote and work in any profession, Kitagawa helped […]

Terry Watada

Terry Watada is a poet, novelist, short story writer, historian, playwright, columnist, essayist, and music composer. He has published five poetry collections, three novels, a short story collection, two manga, two histories on the Buddhist Church in Canada, and two children’s biographies. Significant titles include Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes (Arsenal, Vancouver 2007), novel, The […]