Garrett Hongo

Hongo has attended Pomona College and the University of Michigan, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in English from the University of California at Irvine.

Hongo has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Hongo is a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon. From 1989 through 1993, he was the director of the university's Program in Creative Writing.

Hongo has published three books of poetry: Yellow Light (1982) and The River of Heaven (1988), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.[1] Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i (1995), was awarded the 2006 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Hongo has also worked as an editor on Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays and Memoir by Wakako Yamauchi (1994) and on The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993).

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Garett Hongo, OCLC/WorldCat includes roughly 30+ works in 70+ publications in 2 languages and 4,600+ library holdings .[2]

• The Buddha Bandits down Highway 99 (1978)
• *Yellow Light, University of California, Irvine, 1980; Wesleyan University Press, 1982, ISBN 9780819511041
• The River of Heaven Knopf, 1988, ISBN 978-0-394-56843-0; Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-88748-358-5
• The Open boat: Poems from Asian America (1993)
• Volcano: a Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995)
• The River of Heaven (1998)
• Coral Road: Poems (2011)
• The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017,ISBN 978-0-472-03702-5[3]

Anthologies

• "from Cruising 99", The geography of home: California's poetry of place, Editors Christopher Buckley, Gary Young, Heyday Books, 1999, ISBN 978-1-890771-19-5
• "Yellow Light", Bold words: a century of Asian American writing, Editors Rajini Srikanth, Esther Yae Iwanaga, Rutgers University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-8135-2966-0
• "Kapu Tube", Hawaiʻi: true stories of the island spirit, Editors Rick Carroll, Marcie Carroll, Travelers' Tales, 1999, ISBN 978-1-885211-35-4
• "Something Whispered in the Shakuhachi", What book!?: Buddha poems from beat to hiphop, Editor Gary Gach, Parallax Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-938077-92-3
• Unsettling America: an anthology of contemporary multicultural poetry, Editors Maria M. Gillan, Jennifer Gillan, Penguin Books, 1994, ISBN 978-0-14-023778-8

• List of Asian American writers
• List of people from Hawaii

• Calabrese, Joseph, and Susan Tchudi. (2006). Diversity: Strength and Struggle. New York: Pearson Longman. ISBN 9780321317315; OCLC 60972078
• Serafin, Steven and Alfred Bendixen. (2006). "Hongo, Garrett (Kaoru)," in The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. New York: Continuum. ISBN 9780826417770; OCLC 61478088

• Academy of American Poets bio (accessed March 2008)
• Modern American Poetry page (accessed March 2008)
• Interview with Hongo on Words on a Wire