Garrett Hongo

Poet, memoirist, and audio journalist Garrett Hongo was born in Hawaiʻi and grew up there and in Los Angeles. He earned his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Forthcoming in June is Ocean of Clouds: Poems. Other poetry collections are Yellow Light (1982), The River of Heaven (1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (2011). His most recent non-fiction is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (2022). He has also published The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995). His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, he was given the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Current poems and essays appear in the New Yorker, Georgia Review, Part-Time Audiophile, and Sewanee Review. He lives in Eugene where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.