Kyoko Yoshida

Kyoko YOSHIDA (fiction writer, translator; Japan) was born and raised in Munakata (Fukuoka Pref.) on the Sea of Genkai in Japan, went to college and graduate school in Kyoto, studied creative writing in Milwaukee at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and taught in the port cities of Yokohama and Tokyo. She was at IWP in 2005 and a visiting fellow at the Program of Literary Arts at Brown University in 2006-7. Currently, she lives in Kyoto and teaches American Literature at Ritsumeikan University.

In 2014, her first collection of short stories, Disorientalism, came out from Vagabond Press in Sydney. It features 19 short stories, many of which take place in actual cities re-imagined as a hybrid zone between reality (travelogue) and nightmare (narrative). It also includes several animal fables. Her short stories in English have been published in various journals including Chelsea, Beloit Fiction Review, Cream City Review, Massachusetts Review, and Western Humanities Review. 

She translates Japanese contemporary experimental poetry and drama. Kiwao NOMURA’s [Spectacle & Pigsty] (OmniDawn, 2011), a co-translation with poet Forrest Gander, won the 2012 Best Translated Book Award in Poetry in the US and the 2012 Toson Memorial Rekitei Award in Japan. Her other translations include playwright Masataka MATSUDA’s [Like a Butterfly, My Nostalgia] (Co-translation with playwright Andy Bragen, Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center, 2007), [PARK CITY] (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2010), playwright Shu Matsui’s [Proud Son] (Co-translation with playwright Andy Bragen, 2013 International Play Festival, Ohio Northern University) and playwright Ai Nagai’s [Women in a Holy Mess] (Co-translation with playwright Andy Bragen, Jiritsu Shobo Press, 2013). She also translated Dave Eggers' The Circle  into Japanese. 

Her other fields of interest include contemporary fiction in English and cultural representation of American baseball and its transpacific exchanges in the 1920s and ‘30s.