Lawson Fusao Inada, the current Poet Laureate of the State of Oregon, is a Sansei poet and advocate for the advancement of Asian American literature. He was born in Fresno, California, and, in May 1942, he and his family joined over a hundred thousand other Japanese-Americans in camps where they were confined for the duration of World War II. After the war, Lawson joined the Black and Chicano set, played bass and followed the jazz of Miles Davis, Coltrane, and Billie Holiday. When he returned to Fresno State he began his studies with Phil Levine who introduced him to writing. Lawson was the first Asian-American to publish a collection of poems with a major New York publishing house -- Before the War published by William Morrow. He has read his works at the White House and been hailed as "a poet-musician in the tradition of Walt Whitman." Considered by many to be the father of
Asian-American literature, Inada won the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award (1997) and received two National Endowment of the Arts Poetry Fellowships. His most recent books of poetry are Legends From Camp and Drawing The Line. He is also the editor of Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he has taught at Southern Oregon University since 1966.