Juliet S. Kono

Juliet S. Kono was born in Hilo, Hawai‘i. She attended the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where she earned both her BA and MA. 

Kono is the author of two collections of poetry: Tsunami Years (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1995), which received the Hawaiʻi Book Publishers Association Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Excellence in Literature, and Hilo Rains (Bamboo Ridge Press, 1988), winner of the 1991 Elliot Cades Award for Literature. She has collaborated with poets Ann Inoshita, Christy Passion, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama on two series of linked poems: What We Must Remember (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2017) and No Choice but to Follow (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2010).  

Kono is also the author of the novel Anshū: Dark Sorrow (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2010), and the short story collection Hoʻolulu Park and the Pepsodent Smile (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2004). She has contributed to and edited several anthologies. With Darrell H.Y. Lum and Eric Chock, Kono cocurated Bamboo Ridge Issue 124 (Bamboo Ridge, 2023) in honor of Bamboo Ridge Press’s forty-fifth anniversary. In 1991, Kono and Cathy Song coedited Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women (Bamboo Ridge). 

In 2005, Kono received the Hawai‘i Award for Literature, and in 1999 was awarded the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship. 

Now retired, Kono taught writing as an associate professor at Leeward Community College. She lives in Honolulu.