Poet, dancer, and community activist Janice Mirikitani was born in 1941 in Stockton, California, and earned a BA from UCLA. With her parents, she was interned in an Arkansas camp during World War II and through her poetry and activism is committed to addressing the horrors of war, combating institutional racism, and advocating for women and poor people. Her collections of poetry include Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987), We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (1995), and Love Works (2001); Out of the Dust: New and Selected Poems (2014), and Awake in the River and Shedding Silence (2021) which connects Japanese American discrimination with broader struggles on from the domestic to international levels. Mirikitani has edited several anthologies, including Third World Women (1972), Time to Greez! Incantations from the Third World (1975), and Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980). In 2000, she was named the second poet laureate of San Francisco.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org