Eastern Asia

David Tait is a poet and teacher who lives in Guangzhou, China. His books and pamphlets, all published by Smith|Doorstop Books, include By Degrees (2021); The AQI (2018), shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte…

South Korean avant-garde poet Yi Won grew up in Seoul. She earned a BA from Seoul Institute of the Arts and an MA in creative writing from Dongguk University. Her first poems appeared in print in 1992. She…

Born in Canada, poet and literary scholar Jonathan Locke Hart earned a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has taught literary theory, intellectual…

Kim Hyesoon is a poet, essayist, and critic from South Korea. She was the first woman-identifying poet to win the Midang Literature Award, which she received in 2006.Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection Phantom…

Jennifer Wong was born and raised in Hong Kong. She studied English at Oxford University and earned an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She has a creative writing PhD on Chinese diaspora…

Yosano Akiko is one of the best-known female poets from post-classical Japan. Her work is celebrated for its eroticism and emotional explicitness; the publication of her first collection of poetry, Midaregami…

Takuboku Ishikawa was born Hajime Ishikawa in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. He dropped out of school at age 16 to become a poet and is recognized as a master of the tanka form. He published his first collection…

Poet and farmer Kenji Miyazawa was born in Iwate Prefecture. He studied geology at Morioka Imperial College of Agriculture and Forestry, moved to Tokyo, and began writing poetry, short stories, and children…

Poet and translator Shuntaro Tanikawa was born in Tokyo and came of age in the years following World War II. He once described Japan’s post-war intellectual and creative climate as bleak and existential, with…

Sho Sugita writes and translates poetry in Matsumoto, Japan. His translation of Hirato Renkichi’s Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) is the first book of Japanese Futurist poetry…

Poet and cosmologist Yun Wang grew up in rural southwest China. Her father was a political dissident and her mother was a teacher. She began writing poetry when she was 12, and she majored in physics at Tsinghua…

Yamamoto Isoroku was born in Nagaoka, Niigata, Japan, and adopted by a school master. After graduating from the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy in 1904, he joined the Japanese military during the Russo-Japanese…

Born in Otsuka, an area of Tokyo, Ryuichi Tamura was a prolific Japanese poet, essayist, and translator who published 23 books during his lifetime. He graduated from the Third Tokyo Commercial School before…

Takijiro Onishi was born in Ashida village in Japan. He worked on a battle cruiser during World War I before being assigned to his first aircraft carrier in 1928 and served as an admiral in the Imperial Japanese…

Wang Wei was a poet, painter, musician, and statesman during the Tang dynasty; combining the humanist ideals of a Chinese scholar-official, he served various bureaucratic posts in the Tang court, both in the…

Japanese poet and painter Yosa Buson was born outside Osaka and moved to Edo (Tokyo) to study both painting and haiku. Like his literary hero, Basho, Buson traveled widely through Japan, publishing notes from…

Shuzo Takiguchi was a poet, painter, and art critic, and one of the most prominent surrealists in Japan. His first collection of poems is The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937 (Shinchosha, 1967…

Born in Yokohama, Japan, poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu moved with her family to the United States at the age of six. She earned an MFA at Brown University.   Nakayasu’s poems slip between genres and between…

Mai Mang (Yibing Huang) was born in Changde, Hunan, China. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD in Chinese literature from Beijing University, and he moved to the U.S. in 1993. He holds a second PhD in Comparative…

Poet, novelist, and artist Wang Ping was born in 1957 in Shanghai, China. She grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. She earned a BA in English from Beijing University before immigrating to the United…