Ethnicity 1: Asian American

Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1951

Garrett Kaoru Hongo was born on May 30, 1951, in Volcano, Hawaii. His parents were third-generation Japanese Americans. When Hongo was six years old, his father moved the family to California. Hongo attended a working-class, racially mixed high school in Los Angeles, where he was exposed to urban street life and racial divisions that he would later describe in his poetry. Hongo earned a scholarship and attended Pomona College, in California, where he majored in English. At college, he cultivated his interest in poetry and writing and in Asian American culture in general, graduating in 1973. He then moved to Japan for a year, where he worked and studied at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto. In 1975, Hongo founded a theater group in Seattle called the Asian Exclusion Act, named after laws that had discriminated against Asian immigrants in America. He received attention for...