Susan Ito

Susan Ito began reading at the age of three, and writing stories at the age six. Her recent book, I Would Meet You Anywhere, was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the United States. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She was one of the co-organizers of Rooted and Written, a no-fee writing workshop for writers of color. She lives in Northern California and serves on the Mesa Refuge Board of Trustees.

In the spring of 2020, Susan wrote a beautiful article about Becoming A Grandmother During the Pandemic on McSweeney’s website.

As a 2024 Writer-on-the-Edge at Mesa Refuge, she wrote:

“Writing my memoir, many pages of which were written in Mesa’s East Shed, pushed the edges of how I understood identity, secrets, and family. Now I am working on two novels: one, about a little-known “edge” of history: Japanese Americans in New York City during World War II, as well as a young adult novel about a Japanese American family facing an unexpected teen pregnancy, and its cultural and personal repercussions.”