Craft: Joy Kogawa

Joy Kogawa (b. 1935) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work is unfortunately not well known in the United States. Twelve weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Kogawa was sent with her family to the Slocan internment camp for Japanese-Canadians. After the war she moved from British Columbia to Alberta, but since 1979 has lived in Toronto, Ontario. Her first book, The Splintered Moon, came out in 1969, which contains poems that grew out of her first visit to Japan in 1969. This was followed by A Choice of Dreams, Jericho Road, Woman in the Woods, and A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems. A book of new and selected poems, From the Lost and Found Department, has just been published.

She is also known for a memoir, Obasan, which is about her and her family’s experiences during the evacuation and relocation of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.

Joy Kogawa moving “with imperceptible grace in the elastic afternoon”