Lee Ann Roripaugh


Lee Ann Roripaugh is an American poet and was the South Dakota poet laureate from 2015 to 2019. Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of five volumes of poetry: tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Dandarians, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, Year of the Snake, and Beyond Heart Mountain. She was named winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series.

Early life

Roripaugh was born in 1965 in Laramie, Wyoming. She is the daughter of Robert Roripaugh, poet laureate of Wyoming, and Japanese immigrant, Yoshiko Horikoshi. Her parents met while her father was serving in the US army stationed in Japan, he met her mother and they married in 1956. Growing up in overwhelmingly white Wyoming, in the same state thousands of Japanese Americans were interned in during World War II, Roripaugh grappled with her own mixed race identity. The American West and Japanese culture are visible influences in Roripaugh's work. She earned a B.M. in piano performance from Indiana University, as well as an M.M. in music history and an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Career

Roripaugh is a Professor of English and the Director of Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota. Her interests include Creative Writing, Contemporary American Poetry, Asian American Literature, Multicultural Literature, Poetics, intersectional identities, ecocriticism, popular culture, representations of queer identity in popular culture, and cyborgs. She is also Editor-in-Chief of South Dakota Review. She was appointed to a four-year term as South Dakota's poet laureate in July 2015.

Awards

Books

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