Hiromi Itō emerged in the 1980s as the leading voice of Japanese women's poetry with a series of sensational works that depicted women's psychology, sexuality, and motherhood in fresh and dramatic new ways. In the late 1990s, she relocated to southern California, and since then has written a number of important, award-winning books about migrancy, relocation, identity, linguistic alienation, aging, and death. Her collection Kawara Arekusa won the 2006 Takami Jun Prize, which is awarded each year to an outstanding, innovative book of poetry, and is now published in English translation (WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK, 2015), by Action Books. A selection of her early work appears in KILLING KANOKO: SELECTED POEMS OF HIROMI ITō (Action Books, 2009). Both collections are translated by Jeffrey Angles.

Jeffrey Angles lives in Kalamazoo, where he is an associate professor of Japanese and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan's most important modern Japanese authors and poets.