Leanne Ogasawara’s writing has appeared in Aeon, Lithub, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, the Millions, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Times and elsewhere.
Her short story “Bare Bones” won the 2020 Calvino Prize, judged by Joyce Carol Oates, and her fiction has received support from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
She received her MA in Japanese literature and linguistics from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and BA in philosophy from UC Berkeley. She has a Certificate in Creative Writing from UCLA Extension (her partially-completed memoir manuscript Dreaming in Japanese was nominated by faculty and short-listed for Allegra Johnson Prize). An essay she wrote about Japanese culture is included in the upcoming volume Ma: The Japanese Secret to Contemplation and Calm: An Invitation to Awareness (Tuttle Press) and another essay about Tokyo was recently published in Cities and Identities, edited by Daniel Bell and Avner de Shalit, published by Routledge.
She serves as a reader at the literary magazine Adroit and is the translation editor for Kyoto Journal, an award-winning arts magazine in Japan. She has a long-running monthly column at the arts and science blog 3 Quarks Daily and began writing at 3 Quarks Daily after winning a writing contest at the blog, judged by Gish Jen.
Before turning to fiction she lived in Japan for two decades, where she worked as a translator.
She currently lives in Pasadena with her husband, who is the Edward C. Stone Professor of Physics at Caltech. She writes about all things Japan on her Substack, DREAMING IN JAPANESE.