Introducing: Mariko Nagai

Mariko Nagai is a graduate of New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she was the Remarque Fellow in Poetry. Her stories, poems, and translations have appeared in Pushcart Prize, New Letters, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, 13th Moon, and other journals. She has received multiple Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction (and was nominated two other times, with one poem chosen for inclusion in the Best of Pushcart Prize) as well as residency fellowships from Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Yaddo, UNESCO-Ashberg Bursaries for the Arts, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Histories of Bodies: Poems was the recipient of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award and published by Red Hen Press in 2007, and Georgic: Stories was awarded the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Award. Georgic made the longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award, the world’s largest short story prize. Mariko was nominated for 2011 Pushcart Prize for her story “Confession”, which first appeared in New Letters and won the silver medal in Short Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, and Vietnamese. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Temple University in Tokyo, Japan.