Arts Directory

About

Artist Bio

Being nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Miho Kinnas is a Japanese writer, poet, and translator residing in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. She is the author of three poetry books and one co-authored book. Her poems, book reviews, translations, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Best American Poetry, American Book Reviews, and Tokyo Poetry Journal. She teaches haiku and Japanese literature-based poetry workshops at multiple locations, including Writers.com, New York Writers’ Workshop, and Pat Conroy Literary Center. She often visits local schools and has worked with poets between the ages of 4 and 92. She holds an MFA (creative writing, poetry) from the City University of Hong Kong. She is bilingual in Japanese and English.

Artist Statement

Many words and expressions in one language cannot be replaced in another. Aesthetics grows in a tight community of visible and invisible. We collect those tribal words and carry them with us everywhere we go. It starts early, perhaps inside the mother’s womb. Those words do not need any definition or explanation. They are given to us and live inside us. Once I began writing poetry in another language, the words inside me, now my flesh and blood, began stirring. Yet, I couldn’t find a parallel way into the language I decided to live in. But I should have known better. Before anything became a word in any language, it was there in the heart of our ancestor’s, non-human predecessors’ consciousness and the shine and shadow of the universe. We are simply extracting what had been there. I found my tiny entrance where the thread enters and departs – itoguchi – an opening to my world of poetry, tugging a thin string unspooling that leads me to see how much beauty fills our world.