Education republic of uzbekistan of karakalpak state university named after berdakh faculty of foreign

Janice Mirikitani

Janice Mirikitani is a third-generation (Sansei) Japanese American poet and editor whose involvement in the Asian American literary movement begins in 1970 -- when she creates Aion, widely thought to be the first Asian American literary magazine. 

Like many Japanese Americans of her generation, she and her family were interned during World War II; her family was relocated to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. 

Mirikitani earned a B.A. at UCLA. She then moved to San Francisco, where she briefly was in graduate school for creative writing at San Francisco State University. She started working for the social-justice oriented Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco -- beginning a relationship that has continued to this day. (More recently she has been the president of the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit.) She was also briefly involved in the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA).