about reiko

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was born in Hawaii and grew up in a small “cow town” on the Big Island. Her first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. It also received a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention, and was named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Honolulu Advertiser.

"When I was growing up in Hawaii, everyone was a little bit of this and that. I always thought of myself as half-Japanese and it wasn't until I got to the mainland that I realized I am, for all practical purposes, white. My face defines me, in exactly the same way that my mother's Japanese- American face got her turned away from hotels in the south when she was traveling with her Caucasian husband in the 1960s, in exactly the same way every person is defined in the United States. What a shock that was. I still haven't gotten over it."

In 2001, Rizzuto was awarded a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She spent eight months living in Hiroshima, Japan to research her second and third novels. While she was there, she also began working on a book that is was inspired by her experience of living at the original Ground Zero and interviewing the atomic bomb survivors as the September 11th attacks unfolded within sight of her Brooklyn-based family. This book, Hiroshima in the Morning, will be published in September, 2010.

Rizzuto is a faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program. She is an active member of the Asian American Writers Workshop, where she has taught  workshops, judged awards, and generally tried to help out. She is also the Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City. Her essays and short stories continue to appear in anthologies, journals and newspapers.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is half-Japanese/half-Caucasian. She lives in Brooklyn.