Tanka Sunday 2015 Keynote Speaker

Our keynote speaker for Tanka Sunday 2015 is Amy V. Heinrich. She was at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University for twenty-one years, and its director for eighteen. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1980, and is the author of Fragments of Rainbows: The Life and Poetry of Saitō Mokichi, 1882–1953 (Columbia University Press, 1983) and editor of Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations (Columbia University Press, 1997). Recent tanka translations include Memoir of Forgetting the Capital by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (Columbia University Press, 2011), and, with Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Joan Ericson, Kawaranai Sora Nakinagara Warainagara (The Sky Unchanged: Tears and Smiles) (Kōdansha, 2014), a collection of tanka by victims of the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. She has published widely on library issues as well as in literature. She served as the founding chair of the North American Coordinating Committee on Japanese Library Resources (1991–94), vice chair of the Japan–United States Friendship Commission (2001–2007), and on several other library and academic national and international committees.

In addition to her keynote address on “Reading and Writing: Tanka Arithmetic,” Doctor Heinrich will also participate in the panel discussion and give a reading of her own tanka written in Japanese, with English translations. We’re delighted to welcome Doctor Heinrich to Tanka Sunday 2015!