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Amy Uyematsu is a sansei poet and teacher from Los Angeles. She has five published collections; Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) was her third book, followed by two more recent books, The Yellow Door (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Basic Vocabulary (Red Hen, 2016). Amy won the 1992 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Award for her first collection, 30 Miles from J-Town. In 2006 she was one of the featured poets at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC. Active in the early years of Asian American Studies at UCLA, she co-edited the widely used anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971). Almost five decades later, her biographical essays appear in the anthologies Flashpoints for Asian American Studies (2018) and Mountain Movers: Student Activism and The Emergence of Asian American Studies (2019). Amy was a public high school math teacher for thirty-two years. Currently she leads a writing workshop at the Far East Lounge in Little Tokyo.
