
Writing by Toshi Casey
I am an author, a poet, and an occasional artist.

I am an author, a poet, and an occasional artist.

The Sacramento River

Toshi Casey

Sacramento, CA
I start with our bodies. Their grief, their desire, the sacred and the profane pressed into our skin. My poems come from the women who made me, and the countries that made them: my Japanese grandmother, the Dust Bowl, the ocean my grandfather crossed, the California Valley, the collision of two cultures, and the mother I am.
I wrote my first poem at nine. I have always been writing. When I returned to my education at thirty-five, first at American River College, then at UC Davis as a re-entry student, I managed to graduate with honors. Time on the American River Review and a Borchard Fellowship took me to the Tomales Bay Writers' Conference. My work has appeared in The American River Review, Gap-Toothed Madness, UCD Nameless, and Plain China.
Poetry belongs to everyone, not just the educated few. It has been with us in song from the very first words. It will be here long after I am gone. I try to be a permission-giver, not a gatekeeper. I want to write poems where beauty and ruin live in the same line, where nothing gets buried, where the body speaks because the body holds the lesson.
Feel free to look me up on social media to connect or drop me an email!