Leza Lowitz is a writer who is hard to put in a box. But that's okay with her, because who wants to be in a box? She's published 20 books in many genres--young adult fiction, memoir, poetry, fiction, and translation. Four of her titles have been #1 best-sellers on Amazon. BUZZFEED chose her debut YA novel, "Up from the Sea," as #1 of "5 Young Adult Books You Should Be Reading this January." Her "Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By" is an evergreen bestseller. Lowitz lives in Tokyo, where she also runs a popular yoga studio.
Lowitz is a graduate of U.C Berkeley, where she majored in English Literature. She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She's worked as an advertising assistant at Mademoiselle/GQ magazines at Conde Nast, as an editor on the "Star Wars" archives at Lucasfilm, as an acquisitions assistant at CBS/Fox Video in NY, and as an editorial assistant to anthropologist Richard Leakey.
Her literary awards include the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature, the SCBWI Work-in-Progress Honor for Multicultural Literature, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council. She has also received the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award from Columbia University for the Translation of Japanese Literature, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Editorial Excellence, and a Foreword Reviews Magazine Book of the Year award, and the Bay Area Independent Bookseller's Award.
Lowitz has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post, NPR's "Sound of Writing," NHK Radio Japan, KQED Radio's "Pacific Time," Shambhala Sun, Yoga Journal, Yoga Journal Japan, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune, Harper's, the Asahi Evening News, the Japan Times, the Asahi Weekly, and many more. In the early 1990s, she taught writing and literature at the University of Tokyo. She currently writes a regular column on living between two cultures for Wingspan, All Nippon Airline's in-flight magazine.
Lowitz often writes with her husband, the Middle Grade novelist Shogo Oketani, author of "J-Boys." Building a bridge from East to West, they've collaborated on a book about kanji for tattoos, a collection of poetry by pacifist Japanese soldier-poet Ayukawa Nobuo, and a Young Adult trilogy about a young female ninja's quest to save her ancestral land. Other couples finish each other's sentences. They try to finish each other's books.
