Violet de Cristoforo
Photo by Michael G. Stewart
Bio
Violet de Cristoforo, although born in Ninole, Hawai'i, was sent to Hiroshima, Japan, at the age of eight for her primary education. She returned to the United States when she was 13 to attend high school in Fresno, California. Upon graduation she married Shigaru Matsuda and she joined a School of Haiku and became well known for her poetry in the kaiko, or free-style haiku, form. Following President Roosevelt's Executive Order during World War II, she and her husband were removed to an internment camp in Jerome, Arizona. In 1946, she was repatriated to Japan but she later resettled in the United States with her second husband. Over a period of 50 years she has both written haiku poetry and collected and translated haiku from the internment camps and the various haiku clubs. The culmination of her life's work is the anthology she edited entitled May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow; An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku.