Children's Writing

Lara Okihiro

Dr. Lara Okihiro is a yonsei writer, researcher, and educator of mixed Japanese Canadian heritage. Growing up in the diverse, working-class Dixon Road neighbourhood in Toronto, she was close to her Japanese Canadian grandparents and often visited her Anglo-Irish Canadian grandmother on her rural Ontario farm. Though Lara did not like reading as a kid, […]

Ruth Ohi

Ruth Ohi is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She has illustrated over 60 books, 19 of which she is also the author. Her work includes the illustrations for Naomi’s Tree by Joy Kogawa, and more recently a book about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Kenta and the Big Wave.

Rui Umezawa

Rui Umezawa is a Toronto-based writer of such books as Strange Light Afar and The Truth About Death and Dying. Born in Tokyo in 1959, he left Japan as a child with his father, a theoretical physicist who pursued career opportunities in Europe, the United States, and eventually Canada. Umezawa writes novels, essays, and stories […]

Shizuye Takashima

Shizuye Takashima was one of Canada’s foremost Nisei painters. Beginning in the late 1950s, she became noticed on the Canadian art scene for her skilful and sensitive figurative paintings, but her style and subject matter underwent many transformations throughout her career. She is most well-known for her book, A Child in Prison Camp, which tells […]

Joy Kogawa

Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver in 1935. As a young child, she and her family were forced to leave their home in the Marpole neighbourhood and move to the Slocan internment camp in the interior of British Columbia. Her family’s experience of the forced uprooting of Japanese Canadians later inspired her 1981 novel, Obasan. […]

Warabe Aska

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

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 […]

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 […]