Sawako Nakayasu

Sawako Nakayasu works with language, performance, and translation. Her poetry collections include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2022); Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020); and Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems, 1994–2004 (Burning Deck, 2009), as well as prose works and literary nonfiction, including Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Her translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020) and Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.

Nakayasu is coeditor of A Transpacific Poetics (Litmus Press, 2017), a gathering of poetry and poetics that engages trans-Pacific imaginaries, as well as of a forthcoming anthology of twentieth-century Japanese poetry, coedited with Eric Selland and published by New Directions. Nakayasu teaches at Brown University. In September 2024, she served as the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day.