Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, fiction writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist  and published in March 2022 by Tebot Bach as the winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.  Her poem “Slouching like a velvet rope” won the 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Jericho Brown.

Aoki has received fellowships from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, Jackstraw Writers Program, Clarion West Writers Workshop and Hedgebrook She serves on the board of Clarion West and as an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org.

Her prior publications include Calyx, Hunger Mountain, Nassau Review (winner of the 2015 Writer Award), the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Phoebe, Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Times, Seattle Review, Southern Humanities Review, terrain.org (Letters to America). You can find her tweeting at @baoki or contact her via her website at betsyaoki.com.