Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land
“We Face the Tremendous Meat on the Teppan is a powerful immersive collage of family bonds and intergenerational trauma. It engages in a cinematic and moving time travel, where we are simultaneously in a burning castle and the castle restored, surviving war and speaking to Alexa, and the speaker and her grandmother are  both apart and united across time. This long poem of ‘Firecrackers scatter inside aluminum pots,’ ‘carbonated moons’ and ‘parchment fingers’ is masterful in its language and its interrogation of time, trauma, ancestors and what it means to be a descendant. It beautifully and horrifyingly inhabits the rich complexity of the equation: “she is here, so I am here.”
Ralph Hamilton, author of Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail
"Glyph is a wonder. Wholly original, it's visually dazzling and textually poignant. A stunner!"
Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange​
“I squinted my eyes as a satellite would look for new life,” says the speaker in Where I Was Born, Naoko Fujimoto’s disarmingly honest first full-length poetry collection. Indeed, the poet leaves no stone unturned. In this sumptuous sensory feast, Fujimoto trains one observant eye on family—examining losses and loves that resonate with each of us, even as they remain uniquely her own—while keeping another watchful eye on history’s long shadow across generations. Hiroshima, the marble from a Ramune soda bottle, and a grandmother’s Japanese calligraphy collide with Lake Michigan, Dove soap, and a couple’s first apartment in Lawrenceville, Illinois—alchemizing a global poetry that is as riveting, musical, and iridescent as “the silver sheen of snails after June rain.”
Faisal Mohyuddin,  author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
"What remains, in the aftermath of the horrors humans wreak upon other humans? According to Naoko Fujimoto’s brave, ambitious poems: so many kinds of heartache and grief and so many questions that elude answers, and also the ghosts of dead grandparents and unborn children haunting quiet afternoons spent among fields of wildflowers or along lonely lake beaches. Yet these poems remind the reader—especially the one who reads with heart wide, wide open—that pain, when shared with others, can root us deeper in our collective humanity, can guide us all toward compassion, empathy, perhaps even healing. “It chokes us without a sign, or smell—,” the poet writes, “as if a radioactive current swallowed, / hurting slowly inside / to ripen our bodies.” I so deeply admire the mother who says, “I want your pain,” so deeply admire, too, this poet who has found the words to both capture this pain and to transcend it with such hopefulness and beauty."
Matthew Thorburn, author of Dear Almost
In Silver Seasons of Heartache, Naoko Fujimoto walks a tightrope of language, making her way word by word across the chasm where hope can fall prey to heartbreak, the maybes and might-bes of life transformed into what simply (and complicatedly) is. She is a poet of heart and humor, of insight and image. In carefully crafted yet conversational lines, Fujimoto describes the complications of our modern lives, where “enough is never enough,” but where you also might still be lucky enough to stop and savor the moment when your “breath is quiet— / waiting to catch the last lightning bug.”
Diane Raptosh, Judge of the 2015 contest
"It is gritty and raw, earthy and spare, crafted superbly."
Glass Lyre Press agreed to exclusively show the poetry manuscript,
​"Cochlea", for a limited period. 
Zen and the Art of Poetry by Women - Freesia McKee (6:20) + Naoko Fujimoto (22:00)

The Betsy and FIU Miami Beach Urban Studios, working in partnership with the poetry reading series and online literary journal, SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), are pleased to present a new online series of salons featuring women and women identifying poets.  Curated by three major Miami literary voices: Jen Karetnick, Catherine Esposito Prescott, and Caridad Moro-Gronlier.