Terry Watada

Terry Watada is a Toronto writer with many productions and publications to his credit. His publications include "Ten Thousand Views of Rain" (poetry, Thistledown Press 2001), "Seeing the Invisible" (a children’s biography, Umbrella Press 1998), "Daruma Days" (short fiction, Ronsdale Press 1997), "Bukkyo Tozen: a History of Buddhism in Canada" (history, HpF Press 1996) and "A Thousand Homes" (poetry, Mercury Press 1995). His latest publications are his third collection of poems called "Obon: the Festival of the Dead" (Thistledown Press 2006) and his first novel, "Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes", published in October 2007 by Arsenal Pulp Press (Vancouver BC). He has just completed a cross-Canada tour to promote the novel.

As a playwright, he has seen five of his plays receive a mainstage production, starting with Dear Wes/Love Muriel during the Earth Spirit Festival at Harbourfront in 1991. Perhaps his best known is "Vincent", a play about a Toronto family dealing with a schizophrenic son. It has been remounted several times since its premiere in 1993. Most notably, it was produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the first Madness and Arts World Festival in Toronto (2003). The second Madness and the Arts World Festival invited Vincent to be included in its program in Muenster, Germany, during May 2006. His other plays include Mukashi Banashi I and II (children’s plays) and Tale of a Mask. Toronto’s fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company has selected Mask to be part of its development program to expand it into a two-act play. The play was successfully featured in fu-GEN’s Mega Potluck Play Reading Festival in June 2008. The theatre company plans to premiere the play in a full production by 2010. His latest play, Hanako and the Last Ghosts of Obon (a story of Hiroshima, Vancouver and Nanking), is currently in development with the support of the National Association of Japanese Canadians and Diaspora Dialogues, an arts organization dedicated to promoting first and second generation Canadian immigrant artists in Toronto.

His essays have been published in such varied journals and books as "Canadian Literature" (UBC), "Ritsumeikan Hogaku “Kotoba to sonohirogari”" (Ritsumeikan University Press, Kyoto Jpn), "Crossing the Ocean: Japanese American Culture from Past to Present", Jimbun-shoin Press (Kyoto Jpn), the National Library of Canada’s website, and Anti-Asian Violence in North America (AltaMira Press, California). He also has a monthly column in the Japanese-Canadian national journal the "Nikkei Voice".

He composed the Japanese-Canadian children’s history section and the Japanese, Chinese, and South-Asian Canadian history sections for the National Library and Archives of Canada websites.

Essays about his work have appeared in the International Journal of Canadian Studies, Modern Drama (UTP), and in Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles (TSAR Publications).