Garrett Kaoru Hongo (born May 30, 1951) 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 (1988).

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 (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. Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (1995) 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 (1994) and on The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993).

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.