in Honolulu and teaches mainly for the Poets in Schools program. She is married to Douglas Davenport, a doctor, and has three children.

Song’s struggle to be heard as a poet is tied to her experience as a woman with multiple cultural backgrounds. Her exploration of subject matter related to immigrants, family history, generational ties, Hawaiian culture, and personal visions of life and art is an integral part of the American experience. Confronted with the gulf between ethnic and mainstream cultures, Song has worked toward bridging the gap with creative means informed by her artistic sensibility. Her unfaltering interest in the primacy of the human and the personal, especially from the perspective of women without voices, is a distinct and dominant trait of her poetry.

Having grown up in the culturally and ethnically diverse society of Hawaii in a family that had been there for at least two generations, Cathy Song does not write about racial or ethnic anxieties or the pains of being an outsider in an Anglo world. Her poems reflect a family that has been close and nurturing. The title of her first book, Picture Bride, refers to her Korean grandmother, who immigrated to Hawaii to marry a man who knew her only from a photograph. Song’s paternal grandfather was also Korean; her mother is Chinese. Song’s original title for the book, “From the White Place,” refers to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, which she encountered while at Wellesley College, from which she was graduated in 1977. She went on to receive a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University in 1981. Her vivid imagery and interest in the subject of perspective indicate her fascination with visual art. The dominant strain in Picture Bride is the connection between the first-person speaker and her relatives. Song’s poems show little interest in political or social issues per se. Song’s appreciation of her Asian heritage, however, appears powerfully in poems such as “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which concerns a painting by the eighteenth century Japanese artist, Kitagawa Utamaro, and ends with a haiku: “Two chrysanthemums/ touch in the middle of the lake/ and drift apart.”

Song appears as a somewhat distant narrator in poems such as “Chinatown” and “Magic Island,” which are found in Frameless Windows, Squares of Light. These poems concern the immigrant experience, which she knows only secondhand. The deft beauty of a poem such as “Magic Island” does not compare with the personally felt experience of “Living Near the Water,” in which the poet watches her father give his dying father a drink of water. Her own children appear in these poems: Her blond son in “Heaven,” for example, thinks, “when we die we’ll go to China.”

The blended worlds of Cathy Song are celebrated in her third book, School Figures, which opens with a poem on Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline series of children’s books. “Mother on River Street” depicts the poet’s mother and aunts eating at a Vietnamese restaurant and recalling Sei Mui, who, as a girl, fell out of Mrs. Chow’s car. In the title poem, Western painters such as Piet Mondrian and Pieter Bruegel merge with Katsushika Hokusai. Song’s poems portray not a simple multiculturalism but rather—as in “Square Mile,” in which she sees her son sitting in the same classroom she once sat in and herself on the same hill her father once was on—a profound and affectionate personal unity.

Cathy Song was born in Honolulu in 1955; her mother, Ella Yee Lan Song, was Chinese American, and her father, Andrew Sung Mahn Song, was Korean American and an airline pilot. She grew up in Wahiawa, a small plantation town in a rural section of Oahu, then moved to Honolulu with her family when she was seven years old. She began writing as a high school student and spent two years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, mentored by John Unterecker, a poet and critic. She then moved to New England, completing a bachelor’s degree in English literature at Wellesley College in 1977 and a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University in 1981. She and her family lived on the mainland, in Boston and Colorado, for several years.

Song returned to Hawaii in 1987 with her husband, Douglas Davenport, a physician. They had three children: one daughter, Rachel, and two sons, Joshua and Samuel. Song has taught creative writing at various universities, including the University of Hawaii, and for the Poets in the Schools program, which she enthusiastically supports.

Song became a member of the Bamboo Ridge study group, a group of local Hawaiian poets and fiction writers. She has also worked for the Bamboo Ridge Press. In 1991, Song and Juliet S. Kono edited Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women, a collection of writing by a variety of Hawaiian women that was published by the press.