“Is It Poetry?” review by Janani Ambikapathy! Read the whole review at Poetry Foundation!

I'm a poet, writer and Japanese literary translator from Brookline, Massachusetts. Thank you for visiting my website!

A few words about my background as a writer and literary translator. I studied Linguistics with Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard College (with a minor in Japanese), and the History and Social Study of Science and Technology at MIT.

I’m very grateful for a lifetime of incredible writing teachers: my mother Barbara Helfgott Hyett; my teachers in the Brookline Public Schools (Judith Steinbergh, Judy Rosenberg, Abby Erdmann, Beth Thompson); my professors at Harvard, great poets whose workshops I was lucky enough to enroll in (the late Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney); as well as the very-much-alive Tom Daley who has helped me write both poetry and memoir in recent years.

My poetic family has grown, but its beginnings were with PoemWorks: The Workshop For Publishing Poets, which is the workshop my mother built at our dining table in Brookline when I was growing up. My mom retired from teaching in 2019, and I recently wrote a book about the process of helping my mom accept a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease. Since then, PoemWorks lives on as the PoemWorks Community, a number of Barbara’s former students (including me) who have continued her traditions. My poetry is edited these days by a team of two: Grey Held and Alexis Ivy.

I consider myself a content creator first and foremost. Poetry is only as good as the audience it reaches! With the goal of lifting up all kinds of stories in the community, I have served for 5 years on on the Board of Directors of my local cable TV station and media nonprofit, Brookline Interactive Group (BIG), where I host a TV show called “Telling Your Story.”