Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s highly acclaimed first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000, and was praised by the New York Times as “ambitious, lyrical, and intriguing.” She is a recipient of the US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which inspired her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning; she is also the associate editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City; and she is a faculty member in the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College where she teaches fiction and nonfiction. Her essays and short stories have appeared in journals and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Crab Creek Review, and in anthologies including Mothers Who Think, Because I Said So, and Topography of War. Rizzuto is half-Japanese/half-Caucasian. She grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii and now lives in Brooklyn.