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Amy Hirayama
she/her
Writer/Educator
Amy Hirayama is a mixed-race Japanese and white writer and educator from Seattle, Washington. She is a writer-in-residence with the Seattle Arts and Lectures Writers in the Schools program and is the residential workshop administrator for Clarion West. Food, family, humor and nature are her favorite things, so she writes about them a lot, sometimes all at once.
About Their Work:
"Touching material objects helps me make sense of the world," Amy confesses in her essay "A Legacy of Stuff," and her poems and stories exemplify that ethos. Her writing is full of these myriad things that pile up-- wads of cotton from pill bottles, Hawaiian print fabric from the ‘90s, second-hand suitcases, discarded kitchen faucets, her father's toenails. But these are not merely "intellectually dusty" hoardings of material goods or symptoms of neuroses. These poems and essays are altars, or flux-kit, or portals -- "items as time capsules, as archives and memory banks." Handling these things, she plumbs their material and spiritual properties, leads us to how they tie her and us to time, space, to each other, to our ancestors and the cosmos.
Follow On:
Instagram @hirayama.amy
Website(s):
Books (for purchase):
Online Work:
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