Lawson Fusao Inada was born in 1938 in Fresno, California, a third-generation Japanese American. His grandparents founded the Fresno Fish Market, his father was a dentist, and his mother was a teacher. In 1942, Inada and his family were sent to internment camps, first in Fresno, then in Arkansas and Colorado; he was one of the youngest to live in the camps. A jazz bass player and jazz aficionado, he studied poetry with Philip Levine at Fresno State University. Both jazz and the experience of internment are influences in Inada’s writing. Inada was appointed Oregon poet laureate in 2006. One of his poems is inscribed on a stone at the Japanese American Historical Plaza in Portland, Oregon.