Mariko Nagai is a multigenre writer and translator and an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Creative Writing at Temple University Japan Campus. Born in Tokyo, Japan, and raised in Europe and America, Mariko Nagai has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, among others, and has won the prestigious Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and fiction. She is author of Histories of Bodies: Poems, Georgic: Stories, Instructions for the Living, Dust of Eden: A Novel and The Promised Land: A Novel.
While at the Mesa Refuge, she worked on Irradiated Cities, a collection of poems and photography that trace the history of radiation in Japan, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to Fukushima in 2011, and Women’s Work, a creative nonfiction collection about the global migration of Japanese prostitutes in the late 19th/early 20th century.