Dr. Lara Okihiro is a yonsei writer, researcher, and educator of mixed Japanese Canadian heritage. Growing up in the diverse, working-class Dixon Road neighbourhood in Toronto, she was close to her Japanese Canadian grandparents and often visited her Anglo-Irish Canadian grandmother on her rural Ontario farm. Though Lara did not like reading as a kid, she found herself intrigued by the power and magic of stories and went on to study literature and psychoanalysis in university, eventually earning a MA in English Studies (Goldsmiths College, University of London) and a PhD in English (University of Toronto).

Living abroad, in the UK, Japan, and France, and often being asked about Canada and where she was from, Lara was inspired to learn more about her family’s experience of internment during WWII. Subsequently her research focus changed from Romantic poetry to dispossession in novels about the Japanese Canadian internment.

Lara has taught, lectured, and published internationally on literature, the Japanese Canadian internment, issues of racism, and education. Some of her most rewarding experiences have been teaching English survey courses to classes of diverse and BIPOC students and thinking about how to carry the important lessons of the past into the future. Lara is the author of the children’s novel Obaasan’s Boots, which she co-wrote with her cousin Janis Bridger, and which is based on her grandmother’s life and her family’s experience of being uprooted, incarcerated, and dispossessed. Currently living in Toronto, she is completing Lost Objects (McGill-Queens University Press) about dispossession, hoarding, and the significance of things in literature about the Nikkei internment experience.