Albert Saijo was born in 1926 in the San Gabriel Valley of California. As a teenager, he and his family were interned at Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming. He served with the 442nd in Italy during World War II, then returned to become a Beat Poet in the San Francisco Bay Area. With Lew Welch and Jack Kerouac, he wrote Trip Trap: Haiku On the Road, written in the late 1950s, but not published until 1972. After leaving the city for northern California, he published The Backpacker, a wise and practical book illustrated by his brother, Gompers. He and his wife Laura moved to the Big Island of Hawai`i in the early 1990s. Bamboo Ridge Press published OUTSPEAKS: A RHAPSODY in 1997, and published a tribute to Saijo in their 100th issue in 2012. Saijo died on June 2, 2011.