Christine Kitano is the author of Sky Country (BOA Editions, Fall 2017) and Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press, 2011). She received her BA from the University of California, her MFA from Syracuse University, and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from Texas Tech University. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, and currently lives in Ithaca, NY, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing, poetry, and Asian American literature at Ithaca College.

Books by Christine Kitano:

Other poems on the web by Christine Kitano:
"Gaman"
"Lesson: Chicken Soup"
"Earthquake Drills"
"Choose Your Own Adventure: Go South"
"The Night Before Your 28th Birthday"
Five poems

About Sky Country:

"Christine Kitano writes with clarity and honesty about displacement, deracination, and cultural identity. Her poems in this book convey the dignity of the immigrant in America, the 'sky country' of the title. In one of the most moving of them, 'Story with No Moral,' we can see that indeed there is moral depth to all that she writes. She expresses that depth when she affirms, in 'Autobiography of the Poet at Sixteen,' 'we are built for life, / for love, which means / we are built for pain.' These poems are testimonies of survival and we need their witness as much as ever."
—Mark Jarman

"The poems in Sky Country weave, unravel, and stitch together history and time with such a fierce originality that the images buzz in the mind. Lyrically vibrant and sonically alive, Kitano's gorgeous poems remind us that we are always linked to immigration, to the women that raised us, and it's through our own language that we do the honoring."
—Ada Limon

"The poems in Sky Country sound far from home, stricken with homesickness, and saturated with longing. While they include both personal and collective history, they're spoken in the voice of someone strangely alienated from the former and unaccounted for and excluded from the latter. Beautiful and moving."
—Li-Young Lee