Garrett Hongo
Garrett Kaoru Hongo is a Yonsei, fourth-generation Japanese American academic and poet. His work draws on Japanese American history and his own experiences.
He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The River of Heaven.
Early life
Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai'i. He attended Pomona College and the University of Michigan, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in English from the University of California at Irvine.Hongo has been awarded fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Career
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, and The River of Heaven was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i was awarded the 2006 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Hongo has also worked as an editor on Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir by Wakako Yamauchi and on The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America.
Hongo served as Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day in May 2025.
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. The Buddha Bandits down Highway 99 The River of Heaven The Open boat: Poems from Asian America Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi Coral Road: Poems The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo;Anthologies
- , The geography of home: California's poetry of place, Editors Christopher Buckley, Gary Young, Heyday Books, 1999,
- , Bold words: a century of Asian American writing, Editors Rajini Srikanth, Esther Yae Iwanaga, Rutgers University Press, 2001,
- , Hawaiʻi: true stories of the island spirit, Editors Rick Carroll, Marcie Carroll, Travelers' Tales, 1999,
- , What book!?: Buddha poems from beat to hiphop, Editor Gary Gach, Parallax Press, 1997,
- Unsettling America: an anthology of contemporary multicultural poetry, Editors Maria M. Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, Penguin Books, 1994,