Cathy Song was the first writer born and raised in the state of Hawaii to attain national recognition for her work, which has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, and Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry. In 1994 she won the Hawaii Award for Literature as well as the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has established herself as an important figure in the literature of Hawaii, in the burgeoning canon of Asian American writing, and in the field of contemporary poetry generally.

Born in Honolulu in 1955 to a Chinese American mother and a Korean American father, Song spent her first seven years in Wahiawa, a small plantation town in rural central Oahu; her family then moved to the Waialae Kahala...