Non-Fiction

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]