Janine Oshiro wins the Elliott Cades Awards for Literature, a prestigious literary prize.
By Staff Reports
(Kaneohe)– Author and Windward Community College English instructor Janine Oshiro has been named one of two of this year’s winners of the Elliott Cades Awards for Literature, the most prestigious literary awards in Hawai’i.
The nonprofit Hawai’i Literary Arts Council, which is charged with hosting the awards program, selected Oshiro as winner of the award for an emerging artist.
Oshiro accepted her award and read a selection of poems at the Hawai’i Book and Music Festival on the Civic Grounds at Honolulu Hale held May 5-6.
Oshiro, who teaches at Windward Community College, was born in Kahalu’u and raised in Mililani. She graduated from Whitworth University in Spokane, Wash., received her master’s degree in writing from Portland State University, and studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon’s Literary Arts.
Her first work, Pier, was published last year. Her work has been praised as multidimensional poems that seek to “identify the self that straddles both spiritual and physical worlds.”
The Cades Awards, given annually since 1988, were created by Charlotte and J. Russell Cades in memory of Russell’s brother, Elliott, a teacher and lover of literature. They are given each year to honor the highest literary achievement in the state.