The Before Columbus Foundation has named Karen Tei Yamashita as the winner of its Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature.
Professor Yamashita was born in Oakland in 1951. She grew up in Los Angeles. After attending Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and Waseda University in Tokyo, she studied the extensive history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, worked on translations and screenplays, and produced a number of dramatic works. Coffee House Press, a nonprofit independent press based in Minneapolis, published her first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, in 1991. She is the author of eight books, most recently, Sansei and Sensibility (Coffee House Press, 2020), and numerous plays.