Brynn Saito (she/her), MA, MFA, is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023). A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Brynn also co-authored with Traci Brimhall the poetry chapbook, Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2016). She teaches in the Creative Writing program at California State University, Fresno, located on the traditional lands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples. Brynn is coediting with Brandon Shimoda an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American/Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming in 2025 from Haymarket Books.

Brynn is a Kundiman Asian American poetry fellow and a two-time recipient of the California State Library’s Civil Liberties Public Education grant for her work with Yonsei Memory Project (YMP). Founded in 2017 with farmer, artist, and writer, Nikiko Masumoto, YMP awakens the archives of Japanese American history through arts-based, intergenerational, and intercultural public programming.

Brynn was featured in Vogue magazine’s “Memory Keepers: Japanese American Internment Survivors and Descendants Speak Out.” She is a recipient of a Densho Artists Initiative grant, a Hedgebrook Residency, and was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute’s “Truth and Reconciliation” program. Brynn provided the voice-over narration for the Emmy-winning Valley PBS documentary, Silent Sacrifice: Stories of Japanese American Incarceration.

Brynn is a fourth generation Japanese American and Korean American from Fresno, California. She was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in American Poetry Review, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Along with Traci Brimhall, Brynn also co-authored the chapbook Wild Recovery, published in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic (Tupelo Press, 2020).

Brynn has taught in Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab for emerging writers of color and has been a visiting writer in the MFA programs at University of San Francisco, UNR Lake Tahoe, Saint Mary’s College of California, and California Institute of Integral Studies. Brynn holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (MFA, creative writing), New York University (MA, religious studies), and UC Berkeley (BA, philosophy).