Brynn Saito was born in Fresno, California, to a Korean American mother and a Japanese American father. She earned a BA from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA from New York University; and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013) and Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and the coauthor, with Traci Brimhall, of Bright Power, Dark Peace (2013), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition. Her writing appears in Drunken Boat, Southern Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ghost Town Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. In a review of The Palace of Contemplating Departure, Theresé Samson Wenham writes, “Saito finds an enthralling voice for complex emotions about race, war, identity, scars, ghosts, family, and suffering.” Garrett Bryant comments that Saito “exploits beautiful internal rhymes, consonance and assonance to give her poems a soothing musicality.”

Saito won a Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award for The Palace of Contemplating Departure, which was also a finalist for a Northern California Book Award and a Milt Kessler Poetry Award. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she cofounded the Center for Spiritual Life, and has taught at the California Institute of Integral Studies and the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.