Writing by Toshi Casey

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.