Leza Lowitz was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley, California. She has a B.A. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley, and an M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of numerous honors for her poetry, fiction, and translations, including the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Best Book of Poetry and The Bay Area Independent Publisher’s Association Award for "Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By" and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She has received an individual Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a California Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Poetry, an Independent Scholar Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other honors include the Copperfield’s Dickens Fiction Award, the Barbara Deming Memorial Award in the Novel, the Japanophile Fiction Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Editorial Excellence, the Tokyo Journal Fiction Translation Award, and two Pushcart Prize nominations in Poetry, among others.
In addition to the best-selling book "Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By," she has published two other books of poetry, "Old Ways to Fold New Paper" (Wandering Mind), and "100 Aspects of the Moon" (Printed Matter Press), an award-winning collection of short stories, "Green Tea to Go" (Printed Matter Press), a travel book, "Beautiful Japan" (Charles E. Tuttle), "Designing with Kanji: Japanese Character Motifs for Surface, Skin & Spirit" (Stone Bridge Press) with Shogo Oketani, and "Sacred Sanskrit Words: For Yoga, Chant and Meditation" (Stone Bridge Press) with Reema Datta.
She also edited Donald Richie's "Japan Journals 1947-2004" by the famed Japanese film critic and scholar (Stone Bridge Press). She also published six books of co-translations, including the award-winning anthologies of contemporary Japanese women's poetry, "A Long Rainy Season" and "Other Side River" (Editor, Stone Bridge Press) and "Japan: Spirit and Form by Shuichi "(Co-translator, Charles E. Tuttle). Together with Oketani, she translated modernist poet Ayukawa Nobuo’s "America and Other Poems" (forthcoming, Kaya Press, 2008), for which they received the 2003 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature from the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture at Columbia University.
Her fiction, poetry and translations have been widely published and anthologized around the world, including in Haiku: The Poetry of Zen (Hyperion), Awaiting A Lover (Viking Penguin), Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia Univeristy), Anthology of World Literature (Norton), It's A Woman's World (Dutton) The Poetry of Men's Lives (University of Georgia Press), Expat (Beacon Press), The Broken Bridge (Stone Bridge Press), An Inn Near Kyoto (New Rivers Press), The Poem Behind the Poem (Copper Canyon Press), Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem (Addison Wesley Longman), A Chorus for Peace (University of Iowa Press), If Women Ruled the World (Inner Ocean), GRRR: An Anthology About Bears (Arctos Press), Runes (Arctos Press), among others. Individual work has appeared in Harpers, Wingspan, ZYZZYVA, Prairie Schooner, The Lousiana Review, Web Del Sol, Two Lines, and many others.Lowitz first made her way to Tokyo in 1989, where she worked as a freelance writer/editor for The Japan Times and the Asahi Evening News, and was a lecturer at the prestigious Tokyo University. She then returned to California, but after almost a decade in California, Lowitz relocated to Tokyo in 2003, where she opened Sun and Moon Yoga studio and continues to write. She is grateful to be able to write and to share her love of yoga with others.
Her Translations have appeared in: Harper's, ZYZZYVA, Ms., WINDS, Mänoa, Yellow Silk, Two Lines, Another Chicago Magazine, Five Fingers Review, Tokyo Journal, Tanka Journal, Japan Poetry Review, A ZigZag Joy (Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry), Masters of Modern Japanese Poetry CD (Morris-Lee), etc.Her Essays/Book Reviews have appeared in: The Far Eastern Economic Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, The Asahi Evening News, The Mainichi Daily News, The New England Journal of Medicine, Mänoa, The San Francisco Review of Books, The All Asia Review of Books, Kyoto Journal, The Bloomsbury Review, The Pacific Sun, Poetry Flash.
Her Poems and Fiction have appeared in journals too numerous to list, and have been broadcast on NPR and NHK Radio in Japan.
Her papers on Japanese literature have been presented at American Literary Translator’s Association, The Associated Writing Programs Annual Writers Conference, The Haiku Society of America, The Japan Society of Northern California, and the First Annual Japan Writer's Conference. Her essay on translation appears in Manoa, and The Poem Behind the Poem: On Translating Asian Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). She is also currently Fiction Editor for KYOTO JOURNAL (www.kyotojournal.org)
CHECK OUT THIS INTERVIEW WITH LEZA (APRIL, 2008) ON THE WOMEN ON WRITING WEBSITE:
http://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/
