Wixon, Vincent.

The documentaries produced from this collection of video footage focus on two of the most significant Oregon poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

Lawson Fusao Inada was born in Fresno, CA in 1938, the grandchild of Japanese immigrants. He spent the war years with his family in concentration camps in Arkansas and Colorado, among the ten thousand Japanese Americans to be interned. At Fresno State University he was encouraged to write poetry by Philip Levine. He has been strongly influenced by his great passion, jazz, which informs his preference for poetry in performance. His collections of poetry include Before the War: Poems As They Happened (1971), Legends from Camp (1992), which won the American Book Award, and Drawing the Line (1997), winner of the Oregon Book Award. Among his other publications is Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese-American Internment Experience (2000). He taught at Southern Oregon University until his recent retirement. He is currently poet laureate of Oregon.

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