MFA in Creative Writing Program
My first novel, Why She Left Us, was published in 1999 by HarperCollins and won an American Book Award. The book was inspired by my discovery (at the age of 30) that my Japanese-American mother and her family had been interned during World War II in the American internment camps. My journey to, and through, that novel was the beginning of my own exploration of war, and historical blindness, and our highly individual quests for peace – all of which now lie very much at the center of my writing and my life. After my novel came out, I was awarded a U.S. Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and went to live in Hiroshima, Japan to seek out survivors of the atomic bombings for my next two novels. I was living in Japan and was in the midst of conducting this research on September 11, 2001 when my own family was in New York trying to deal with the terrorist attacks. My second book, Hiroshima in the Morning, is a nonfiction account of how those two “wars” collided from my perspective as a writer, an expatriate and a mother. In addition to these book-length works, my essays and stories have appeared in a number of places, on topics ranging from childbirth to divorce, and from war, to aikido, to fishing off the Big Island of Hawaii where I grew up. New work is forthcoming in Mothers Who Think 2 (HarperCollins), and in Topography of War (an anthology on the impact of a century of war on Asian Americans from Temple University Press). I have written four young adult novels under a pseudonym and currently have two adult novels in progress.
As for my writing, I came to prose from science (I majored in astrophysics in college), and am still experimenting with the best ways to wield both my analytical and creative sides. As a teacher, my initial focus is to help each student strip away analysis (and self consciousness) and find the unique urgency in her or his work, and then to use the appropriate tools and craft to tease out the surprises and idiosyncrasies that belong to each alone. I am interested in structure, and in memory, and in the use of historical research in fiction and creative non-fiction. I look forward to working with any student at any stage in their writing career, as long as they are serious about their process and their growth. My website is www.r3reiko.com and you can also find me at the Asian American Writers Workshop.
Educational Background: BA in Astrophysics, Columbia University.
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Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, BA