Garrett Hongo

Poet, memoirist, and audio writer Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. He earned his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from the University of California-Irvine, where he studied with the poets C.K. Williams, Howard Moss, and Charles Wright. His 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 publication is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (2022). In other non-fiction, he has published The Mirror Diary (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995), perhaps his best known work. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Current poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, Harvard Review, SoundStage! Ultra, Georgia Review, terrain.org, and Sewanee Review. He lives in Eugene where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Photo credit: Steven Varni.