Momoko Iko

Iko moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in the late 1970s. There she was a founder member of Pacific Asian American Women Writers West (PAAWWW). She died at her Los Angeles home on July 19, 2020.

After seeing Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, Iko turned an unpublished novel into her first play, Gold Watch. First produced by Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles in 1972, Gold Watch is thought to be the first play written by an Asian American woman produced in the continental United States. The play had several productions and was shown on television on PBS in 1975. She was a founding member of the Asian Liberation Organization in Chicago.

Iko studied at Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a BA in English in 1961. She also studied at the Instituto Allende in Mexico and started a MFA at the University of Iowa, where she met the writer Nelson Algren.

Momoko Iko (1940–2020) was a Japanese-American playwright, best known for her 1972 play Gold Watch.

Momoko Iko was born to Kyokuo and Natsuko (Kagawa) Iko on March 30, 1940 in Wapato, Washington. She was the youngest of six children. After the start of World War II, Iko was interned, aged two, at Heart Mountain Relocation Center following the signing of Executive Order 9066. Her family were the last to leave the camp in 1945, as they did not know where to go. The family initially worked as migrant farm workers in Wyoming before settling in Chicago.