About Christine Kitano
Christine Kitano is an American poet and the author of two collections of poetry, Sky Country (BOA Editions, 2017), and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press, 2011). Sky Country won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press, 2024) won the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize. She co-edited the oral history collection Who You? Hawai'i Issei (University of Hawai'i / Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i Press, 2017) and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women's Poetry (Blue Oak Press, 2022). She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University where she teaches in the MFA and BFA programs in Creative Writing and Literature. She has served on the faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 2018.Originally from Los Angeles, CA, Christine is of Japanese and Korean ancestry. Her father, Harry Kitano, was incarcerated at Topaz Concentration Camp during WWII, then helped to found the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA where he taught for nearly forty years. Her mother immigrated from Korea as a teenager. Christine's poetry and scholarship explore these familial legacies.
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