Yurina Yoshikawa

Yurina Yoshikawa holds a B.A. from Barnard College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, NPR, Lit Hub, The Japan Times, AAWW’s The Margins, The New Inquiry, The Tennessean, The Pinch, Edible, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the Tennessee True Stories Prize and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, Hewnoaks, Baldwin For The Arts, and the Southern Arts Prize’s Tennessee State Fellowship. She has lived in Tokyo, Palo Alto, and New York before settling down in Nashville, where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is the Director of Education at The Porch Writers’ Collective and hosts the Japanese literature book club for the Japan-America Society of Tennessee. For more information, visit https://yurinayoshikawa.com/.

Artist Statement

As a Japanese-Korean woman who has spent half of her life in Japan and the other half in various parts of the United States, I have always felt like a straddler of two worlds. As a child in Tokyo, I was constantly made to feel like a foreigner because of my Korean surname. In New York where I lived throughout my 20s, I kept gravitating towards other Japanese expats out of a strange homesickness for a place that never accepted me. When I moved to Nashville in 2017, I was surprised to discover many parallels between the Japanese and Southern cultures, some of which were subtle like our value in hospitality, or weighty in the ways both cultures reckon with having lost a major war. I was often the only person of color in any given room, and yet I found myself feeling “at home” for the first time in my life. Just as I was settling in, my mother passed away during the pandemic in 2020, and I had to re-evaluate once more what “home” meant for me. Is “home” about the place or the people? Is it about my biological family or my chosen one? My fiction is not meant to give clear answers to these questions, but I find it important for my characters to wrestle with them, as I have.