WSU Visiting Writers Series reading with author Ryka Aoki
YOUTUBE LIVE | FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | NO REGISTRATION NECESSARY
About the event
Ryka Aoki is a transgender woman and Japanese-American poet, composer, teacher, and the author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo (A Hilo Song), Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul, and The Great Space Adventure. Aoki’s work has appeared or been recognized in Vogue, Elle, Publisher’s Weekly, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, The Daily Dot, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The San Francisco Bay Times, and the Huffington Post.
She was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.” She was the inaugural performer for the first ever Transgender Stage at San Francisco Pride, and has performed in venues including the San Francisco Pride Main Stage, Barnard College, the National Queer Arts Festival, Yale University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Iceland, the University of Winnipeg, and Ladyfest South. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and is currently a professor of English at Santa Monica College. She is a two-time Lambda Award finalist, and winner of the Eli Coppola Chapbook Contest, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and a University Award from the Academy of American Poets.