ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø

Sabbatical, Spring 2025

Associate Professor

English

[image: a painting by my grandmother, June (Chizuko Yamashita) Shimoda, which she made shortly before she passed away (October 8, 2023)]

 

Who, then, will write the history of the bottom, the history of the moss?—Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi

How do you write a history that is both [yours] and [not yours] but an extension of an improbable future? —Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, the Swarm

 

I'm a mixed race yonsei (4th-gen Japanese American) poet and writer. I have taught writing to students of all ages, from elementary school students just beginning to discover the pleasure and power of transforming their experiences—their joys, dreams, fears, curiosities—into stories, to elders considering the extent of their lives and hoping to make for themselves and their descendants an inhabitable, panoramic record. I have taught at the University of Arizona, the UA Poetry Center, Kaohsiung American School (Taiwan), the University of Montana, Occidental College, Pacific Northwest College of the Arts/Willamette University, and Pima Community College.

All of my classes incorporate, in some form: memory studies, ancestral studies, dream studies, and creative research methodologies. I generally teach what I, as a writer, am thinking about/trying to figure out in my own writing.

Among the writers/artists whose work I have shared most recently with my students: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, James Baldwin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kiku Hughes, Bhanu Kapil, Elias Khoury, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mohammad Malas, Na Mira, Janice Mirikitani, Carol Nguyen, Emiko Omori, Sei Shōnagon, Agnès Varda.

Recent visitors to my classes include: Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Jennifer S. Cheng, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, Summer Farah, Kimiko Hahn, Elizabeth Ito (creator of City of Ghosts), Bhanu Kapil, Youna Kwak, Hea-Ream Lee, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Chizu and Emiko Omori, Troy Osaki, Brynn Saito, Kelly Shimoda (my sister), Q.M. Zhang, and my daughter's entire elementary school class.

I am the author of several books of poetry and/or prose (see below). My writing has been published in BOMB Magazine, Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. My most recent book, (winner of the ), is on the memory/forgetting of Japanese American incarceration, and includes the voices/testimonies of 200+ survivors and descendants of the WWII prisons and camps.

I am also the curator of , an itinerant collection/reading room of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their many afterlives. The library is currently on display at the Albert Seay Library and Music and Art at ºÚ°µ±¬ÁÏÍø.

Books

, co-editor, with Brynn Saito (poetry, Haymarket Books, 2025)

 (nonfiction, City Lights, 2024). Winner of the Colorado Book Award.

 (poetry and prose, Nightboat Books, 2023)

(nonfiction, City Lights, 2019). Winner of the PEN Open Book Award.

(poetry and prose, The Song Cave, 2018)

(poetry and prose, Letter Machine Editions, 2015). Winner of the William Carlos Williams Award.

, co-editor, with Thom Donovan (Nightboat Books, 2014)

(poetry, Octopus Books/Tin House Books, 2013)

(poetry, Litmus Press, 2011)

(poetry, Black Ocean, 2011)

(poetry, Flim Forum Press, 2008) 

 (poetry, Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008)

Courses

Senior Creative Writing Workshop

Beginning Creative Nonfiction Writing

Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing

Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Correspondences: Epistolary Reading & Writing

Put Your Hand on the Grave: The Art of Creative Research

Asian American Creative Nonfiction/Experimental Writing

1945: Politics and Poetry of Northeast Asia (with Jiun Bang)