Violet Kazue de Cristoforo

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (September 3, 1917 – October 3, 2007) was a Japanese American poet, composer and translator of haiku. Her haiku reflected the time that she and her family spent in detention in Japanese internment camps during World War II. She wrote more than a dozen books of poetry during her lifetime. Her best known works are Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944, which was written nearly 50 years after her detention and May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow; An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, for which she was the editor.

She was a major advocate for redress for Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during the war. The work of Cristoforo and other activists ultimately led the United States government to make reparations and issue an official apology to the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.