Kyoko Mori (edit name/settings)

A Japanese-American poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer, Mori was raised in Kobe, Japan, and, inspired by her mother and grandfather, began to write in both Japanese and English at an early age. “These two people in my family gave me the idea that writing was something we did everyday or even every week with enjoyment.” At age 12, Mori was devastated when her mother committed suicide. She moved to the United States four years later to attend college, receiving her bachelor's degree from Rockford College and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She joined the MFA faculty, at George Mason University, in 2005 to teach creative non-fiction. During a speech about her career, she discussed being an 'Asian American' writer, with a decided emphasis on American. "I feel as much like a mid-westerner as I feel like a Japanese," she said, and recalled reading western authors before Japanese. "In high school I discovered Jane Austen, and I've never been the same." Describing her sense of home, "when you don't live in the place of your childhood anymore," she spoke of how a visit to the Impressionist wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art evoked her experience of viewing similar paintings as a child. "There I was, 30 years later, standing in the same space my Mother and I had occupied on that gray day in Kobe, Japan." Author of six novels, including the brand new Stone Field, True Arrow, Dr. Mori described how fiction and reality collide. "Often when I write fiction, I find that the things I make up open doors for me and allow me to write about truth in a different way ... Some people are like fictional characters, even if they're real people in your lives ... If I made them up, it wouldn't be as good."