Fumiko was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, and decided to pursue her college education in the States. She graduated from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California with a BA in English literature. In college, she was involved in the International Students’ Club and served on a task force to help build the bridge between international and American students. She also contributed her poems to her college literary magazine during her senior year.

After graduating, Fumiko worked for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical marketing company in Japan for two years prior to earning her MA in English literature from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. During this time, she was a TA in Japanese and taught the speaking portion of beginning Japanese and third-year Japanese. It was in the early 1990s when many people were interested in learning the language. After finishing graduate school, she went back to Japan and worked as an English language teacher at a private language school for two years. When her husband’s work contract expired, they decided to move to his home state of Iowa since he had some contacts there. This led to her starting her teaching career at Kirkwood Community College.

Fumiko has been teaching college-level composition courses and tutoring at the writing center at various community and technical colleges for over 20 years. When she teaches, she encourages students to cultivate their authentic voice in their writings as she truly believes personal stories are extremely powerful. For Fumiko, it is most powerful and rewarding to witness students grow tremendously as writers and people by generating courage to take a risk to share their deeply personal stories. She learns from them how complex human experiences are, and it helps her to recognize each student as a unique individual.

In her free time, Fumiko likes to take long walks with her dogs, read books, listen to audio books, write poems (not very consistently…), and bake with her daughter.