Poetry

Chie Kamegaya

Chie Kamegaya was a poet and author of Seasons in New Denver: Haiku (1994). Born in Japan to a samurai family, Kamegaya became a teacher in Tokyo, where she met her husband. After marriage, she joined him in Canada, and they both taught at the New Westminster Japanese Language School from 1931 to 1941, when […]

Takeo Ujo Nakano

Takeo Ujo Nakano was an Issei poet and author of the memoir Within the Barbed Wire Fence, which recounts his experience of the Japanese Canadian internment in road camps and the Angler POW camp. Born in Japan, Nakano immigrated to Canada in 1920, and was living in Woodfibre, BC with his wife and young daughter […]

Mona Oikawa

Mona Oikawa is a writer. An active player in the 1980s and 1990s in Toronto in the lesbian and Asian Canadian literary scene with various publications of poems and short stories, she is now best known as an academic, particularly for her book Cartographies of Violence: Japanese Canadian Women, Memory and the Subjects of Internment, […]

Roy Miki

Roy Miki is a Vancouver-based poet and critic, well-known for his award-winning poetry, literary criticism, theoretical texts, editorial work, as well as for his activist work as part of the Redress movement in the 1980s. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Governor General’s award-winning Surrender (2001), the documentary text, co-authored […]

Miyo Tominaga

Miyo Tominaga is a tanka poet. She was born on August 6, 1918 in Nagano Prefecture and studied tanka and shodo in Japan. She moved to Quebec in 1987 and was the instructor of a tanka study group in Montreal in the 1990s and a long-time member of the ASUKA tanka group now dissolved. She […]

Baco Ohama

Baco Ohama describes herself as a sensorialist, a writer, a text walker, a maker, and as an artist who works with the felt and the found. She says she is drawn to slow conversations and everyday poetics, and often finds herself thinking about the relationships between history, language, and location. A sansei who grew up […]

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. […]

Dorothy Livesay

Dorothy Livesay was a widely respected Canadian poet. Amidst a long and noted body of literary work, she is included in this directory for her long poem Call My People Home (1950), one of the earliest artistic works to address the Japanese Canadian internment and decry its injustices. Call My People Home was also recorded […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]