Garrett Kaoru Hongo (born May 30, 1951[1]) is a Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet. His work draws on Japanese American history and his own experiences.[2]
Hongo is a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. From 1989 through 1993, he was the director of the university's Program in Creative Writing.
Hongo has published three books of poetry. His first was Yellow Light (1982), and The River of Heaven (1988) was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[2]Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (1995) was awarded the 2006 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction.[1] Hongo has also worked as an editor on Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir by Wakako Yamauchi (1994) and on The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993).[3]
Hongo served as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day in May 2025.[4]
Selected works
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Garett Hongo, OCLC/WorldCat includes roughly 30+ works in 70+ publications in two languages and 4,600+ library holdings.[5]
"Yellow Light", Bold words: a century of Asian American writing, Editors Rajini Srikanth, Esther Yae Iwanaga, Rutgers University Press, 2001, ISBN978-0-8135-2966-0
"Kapu Tube", Hawaiʻi: true stories of the island spirit, Editors Rick Carroll, Marcie Carroll, Travelers' Tales, 1999, ISBN978-1-885211-35-4
Unsettling America: an anthology of contemporary multicultural poetry, Editors Maria M. Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, Penguin Books, 1994, ISBN978-0-14-023778-8
Drake, Barbara. (1992). "Garrett Kaoru Hongo," in American Poets since World War II, 3rd series (Gwynn, R. S., ed.). Detroit, Michigan: Gale. ISBN9780810375970; OCLC 26158348
Fonseca, Anthony J. (2005). "Garrett Kaoru Hongo," in Asian American Writers (Madsen, Deborah L., ed.) Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale. ISBN9780787681302; OCLC 57414491
Kamada, Roy Osamu. (2006). "Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance in the Work of Jamaica Kincaid, Garrett Hongo and Derek Walcott," in Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 2006 Jan; 66 (7): 2573. U of California, Davis, 2005. (dissertation abstract)
Schröder, Nicole. (2006). Spaces and Places in Motion: Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr. ISBN9783823362531ISBN3823362534; OCLC 76949181
Witonsky, Trudi. (2000). "Twilight Conversations: Multicultural Dialogue," in Asian American Studies: Identity, Images, Issues Past and Present (Ghymn, Esther Mikyung, ed.) New York: Peter Lang. ISBN9780820439259; OCLC 40881565
Journals
Colley, Sharon E. "An Interview with Garrett Hongo," Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic-American Literature, 1996 Summer; 4: 47-63.
Hull, Glynda. "This Wooden Shack Place: the Logic of an Unconventional Reading," College Composition and Communication, 1990 Oct; 41 (3): 287-98.
Jarman, Mark. "The Volcano Inside," The Southern Review, 1996 Spring; 32 (2): 337-43.
McCormick, Adrienne. "Theorizing Difference in Asian American Poetry Anthologies," MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2004 Fall-Winter; 29 (3-4): 59-80.
Sato, Gayle K. "Cultural Recuperation in Garrett Hongo's The River of Heaven," Studies in American Literature (Kyoto, Japan), 2001 Feb; 37: 57-74.
Slowik, Mary. "Beyond Lot's Wife: the Immigration Poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura," MELUS, 2000 Fall-Winter; 25 (3-4): 221-42.
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