Tamiko Nimura is an Asian American creative nonfiction writer and public historian living in Tacoma, Washington. She has degrees in English from UC Berkeley (BA) and the University of Washington, Seattle (MA, PhD). Her poems, essays and interviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Off Assignment, Narratively, The Rumpus, Full Grown People, Heron Tree, HYPHEN, Kartika Review, and Blue Cactus Press. She has essays in the anthologies Ghosts of Seattle Past (2018) and New California Writing (Heyday 2012). At UC Berkeley, she studied creative writing with Ishmael Reed and Gary Soto. She has read at the Looseleaf Reading series (Seattle), King’s Books and Blue Cactus Press (Tacoma), and the San Francisco Public Library. She is a 2016 Artists Up grant recipient and a 2019 GAP Award recipient.

She has been awarded a Tacoma Arts Commission Tacoma Artists Initiative Project grant (2021-22) for her memoir-in-progress, A PLACE FOR WHAT WE LOSE. She was also awarded an AMOCAT Community Engagement Award for her artistic and community work in 2022.

Her training in literature and American ethnic studies prepared her to research, document, and tell the stories of people of color. She is currently an Affiliate Professor in the School of Urban Studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma.

Tamiko’s first book was Rosa Franklin: A Life in Health Care, Public Service, and Social Justice (Washington State Legislature Oral History Program, 2020). Her second book is a co-written graphic novel, titled We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press/Wing Luke Asian Museum, 2021).