Amy Uyematsu

Amy Uyematsu, a third-generation Japanese American, was raised in Southern California by parents who were interned at Manzanar and Gila concentration camps during World War II. A graduate of University of California, Los Angeles in mathematics, Uyematsu became active in Asian American Studies in the late sixties. As a college senior, she penned the essay “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America” (Gidra, 1969), an assertion of Asian American identity influenced by the consciousness-raising theories of the Black Power movement. That same year she joined the staff of the newly formed UCLA Asian American Studies Center, where she co-edited the widely-used anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971).

Uyematsu is the author of several poetry collections: That Blue Trickster Time (2022), Basic Vocabulary (2016), The Yellow Door (2015), Stone Bow Prayer (2005), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (1997), and 30 Miles from J-Town (1992), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Uyematsu’s poems consider the intersection of politics, mathematics, spirituality, and the natural world. Her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (1993), Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004), What Book: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop (1998), On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast (1995), Sister Stew (1991), and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (2015). In 2012, Uyematsu was recognized by Friends of the Little Tokyo Branch Library for her writing contributions to the Japanese American community. Uyematsu died at the age of seventy-five on June 23, 2023.