LA-Lit interviewed Sawako Nakayasu on Sunday, December 10th at 5pm.

Sawako Nakayasu is currently writing about, through, on, around and with ants and other insects, but mostly ants. She was born in Yokohama, Japan, and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her books include Insect Country, (A)Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press), So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press), and Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002). She is currently working on an insect-based collaborative project featuring ants, while editing the journal Factorial, which often features contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation. In 2006 she received a Witter Bynner Foundation poetry translator residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute and a PEN Translation Fund Grant for translations of Chika Sagawa and Takashi Hiraide, respectively. Her own writing has been translated into Japanese and Swedish, and Arabic.