Having grown up in Europe and America, Mariko Nagai studied English with concentration in poetry at the New York University where she was the Erich Maria Remarque Fellow. She has received the Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction (nominated five times in total) and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Yaddo, and Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, to name a few. Her works have appeared in Pushcart Prize anthologies, Best Pushcart Poetry of the Last 30 Years, New Letters, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Asia Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, amongst others. She is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2007), Georgic: Stories in 2009 (BkMk Press/University of Missouri Kansas City, 2010), Instructions for the Living (WordPalace Press, 2012) and Dust of Eden: A Novel (Albert Whitman & Co, 2014). Vietnamese and Romanian translations of Georgic: Stories are in 2015. Her own work has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Bulgarian, Romanian and German. She currently lives in Tokyo and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Japanese Literature at Temple University Japan Campus.