Violet Kazue de Cristoforo

de Cristoforo was born Kazue Yamane in Ninole, Hawaii. It was a common practice for Japanese immigrants to send their children to Japan to study and spend time with relatives, and at age eight de Cristoforo was sent to Hiroshima for her primary education. She returned to the United States at thirteen, rejoining her family at their new home in Fresno, California. After graduating from high school in Fresno, she married her first husband, Shigeru Matsuda. The couple ran a Japanese bookstore and joined a haiku club in the area. By the start of World War II, de Cristoforo had established herself as a well-known poet in the kaiko style, a modernist, freestyle subgenre of haiku. ==World War II==

About a month after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast with Executive Order 9066. By the time the Matsudas were "evacuated" from their Fresno home in April 1942, the couple had two small children and de Cristoforo was pregnant with a third — and recovering from surgery to remove a tumor. Matsuda, already in custody after joining a committee to investigate food shortages in Jerome, was transferred to the Justice Department internment camp at Santa Fe, New Mexico, while de Cristoforo and their three children were sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California. Throughout her time in camp, de Cristoforo continued to write, publishing some of her haiku in camp newspapers and literary magazines. Her time in camp left a lasting imprint on her writings. Much of the original haiku that were written during her years in the camps has been lost or destroyed, however, her surviving writings and later work reflected the desolation and despair that she felt during that period. ==Post World War II==

de Cristoforo and her children were expatriated to Japan in 1946, her husband having been transported there earlier. Upon arriving in Japan, de Cristoforo discovered that her husband had remarried to a Japanese woman. She also witnessed firsthand the destruction of the atomic bomb and its effects on Japanese civilians when she went to Hiroshima to find her mother. She later described the reunion in an interview, recalling that when she found her mother wandering in the hills outside the city, the severe burns the woman had suffered in the bombing made her "look like a monster." She spent several years in post-war Japan, during which time she met her second husband, Wilfred H. de Cristoforo, an Army officer with the occupation forces. The couple moved back to the United States in 1956 and settled in Monterey, California. In addition to her writing, de Cristoforo took a publishing job at the McGraw-Hill Companies, and over the years she published a total of six books and anthologies of poetry. She played an active role in the redress movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and testified in one of the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, whose recommendations ultimately led to the passage of the landmark Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Her marriage to Wilfred lasted until his death in 1998. ==Honors==

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo was honored in Washington D.C. by the National Endowment for the Arts in September 2007, just before her death. The NEA awarded her a National Heritage Fellowship for cultural achievement for her writings. The National Heritage Fellowship Award is the highest award given in the United States to honor achievement in traditional and folk arts. ==Death==

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo died from complications from a stroke on October 3, 2007, at her home in Salinas, California. She died just two weeks after receiving the National Heritage Fellowship Award. She was 90 years old. Cristoforo was survived by two daughters, a son, and two grandchildren. ==References==