Velina Hasu Houston

Her plays are studied in the US, Asia, and Europe in high schools and in colleges and universities. She is the only American playwright to amass a body of work that explores the transnational US-Japan relationship through stories that include a bilateral, global view of identity and belonging. The former Honorable Consul General of Japan of Los Angeles Kazuo Kodama paralleled Houston’s work in drama to the work of Isamu Noguchi in fine art, both being offspring of one Japanese parent and one American parent.

Her most recent production was a premiere of her adaptation of Little Women, produced by the Playwrights' Arena in Los Angeles, on October and November, 2017.

Houston has been recognized as a Japan Foundation Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow (twice), a Sidney F. Brody Fellow, a James Zumberge Fellow (thrice), a California Arts Council fellow, and a Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts Fellow. She is a Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medalist for Calling Aphrodite, which also was a finalist for the American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award for its 2007 world premiere.

The family settled in Junction City, Kansas, a small town adjacent to the military base, living a culturally Japanese lifestyle at the insistence of Velina's mother, Setsuko. In 1969, as a result of combat-related stress and alcoholism, Velina's father died. Setsuko continued raising her family in Junction City, a community consisting of hundreds of mostly Japanese and European immigrant women who married Americans after World War II.

Velina Hasu Houston (born Velina Avisa Hasu Houston on May 5, 1957) is an American playwright, essayist, poet, author, editor and screenwriter who has had many works produced, presented and published, with some drawing from her experience of being multiracial, as well as from the immigrant experiences of her family and those she encountered growing up in Junction City, Kansas.

In 1949, Velina's father returned to the United States. In order to be reunited with Setsuko, he volunteered for active duty in the Korean War and returned to Asia in 1951. Lemo and Setsuko's nine-year courtship was due to the fact that he respected her wishes to remain in Japan to care for her ailing mother. The couple married in 1954 and came to the U.S. in 1957 with the adopted Joji and Velina's sister Hilda Rika Hatsuyo, Velina being born en route and granted citizenship at her father's first U.S. military assignment at Fort Riley. Their new American experience was met with being discriminated against by Americans (including Japanese Americans) from both within and outside of their family, but the experience strengthened them and planted the seeds for the young writer.

Her parents met in Kobe in 1946, beginning their nine-year courtship at the disapproval of Velina's maternal grandfather who committed suicide as a result of his country's defeat in World War II (exacerbated by his daughter's desire to marry an American) and by the loss of his family's land due to the land reform policies supported by the US occupation. After the couple married, they eventually severed ties with both their families. The couple went on to adopt their only son Joji Kawada George Adam Houston, an Amerasian, in Tokyo after he was left orphaned at eight years old during the U.S. occupation.