I was born and raised in Honolulu. I am the author of Sista Tongue, a collage-essay that investigates the social history of Hawai‘i Creole English through research and memoir, and this will be the focus of my presentation. My work can also be found in Bamboo Ridge publications, Hybolics, and Tinfish.

I received both my B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa, and I am currently a lecturer in English at Kapi‘olani Community College.

I will talk in comparative terms about recent books by Lisa Kanae (Sista Tongue) and Lee Tonouchi (Living Pidgin). While Kanae’s book grounds Pidgin in local plantation history, Tonouchi is more interested in Pidgin’s future.

I teach poetry and creative writing in the English Department at UH Manoa. I run Tinfish Press out of my home in Kaneohe; both Kanae’s and Tonouchi’s books were published by Tinfish.

I will be looking primarily at Lee Tonouchi’s work to discuss some of the challenges facing local writers who seek to give voice to a local identity and resist the dominant culture and its standard dialect.

I hold an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of London and a PhD on political theatre from UC Santa Barbara. I teach in the English Department here at UH Manoa.

I will read from my work and talk about how writing in my first language is partly a project to seize back the imagination that was taken from me and others by an imperialist educational system.

I’m on the Creative Writing faculty in the Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and have published a collection of short stories, The Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories, and a novel, A Ricepaper Airplane. Forthcoming is another novel, Children of a Fireland. In Fall 2002, I was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Korea University, Seoul.