Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was born in Hawai’i (August 5, 1963) and grew up in a small “cow town” on the Big Island. Her novel about the Japanese American incarceration camps, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. It also received a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention, and was named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Honolulu Advertiser.

From her website: “When I was growing up in Hawai’i, everyone was a little bit of this and that. I always thought of myself as half-Japanese and it wasn’t until I got to the mainland that I realized I am, for all practical purposes, white. My face defines me, in exactly the same way that my mother’s Japanese-American face got her turned away from hotels in the south when she was traveling with her Caucasian husband in the 1960s, in exactly the same way every person is defined in the United States. What a shock that was. I still haven’t gotten over it.”

Selected Works

• Hiroshima in the Morning 2020
• Shadow Child 2018
• Why She Left Us 1999

Links

• Personal Website
• Twitter
• Instagram