Born in Tokyo and raised in Europe and America, Mariko Nagai studied English/Creative Writing - Poetry at New York University. Her numerous honors include the Erich Maria Remarque Fellowship from New York University, fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Akademie Schloss Solitude, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Yaddo, and Writers Center of Norwich, to name a few. She has received the Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction. Nagai's collection of poems, Histories of Bodies, won the Benjamin Saltman Prize from Red Hen Press, and her first collection of stories, Georgic: Stories won the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Fiction Prize from BkMk Press. Her other books include Dust of Eden (Albert Whitman & Co, 2014), Irradiated Cities (Les Figues, 2016), Under the Broken Sky (MacMillan, 2019) and Body of Empire (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020). She is Professor of Creative Writing and Japanese Literature at Temple University, Japan Campus in Tokyo, where she is also the Director of Research. She also serves as Co-Regional Advisor of SCBWI Japan.