Born and raised in the DC area, Gabrielle Oliver is a first year MFA Creative Writing Poetry student at the University of Kentucky. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Howard University and Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. A self-proclaimed linguist, Oliver is most proficient in Japanese – with her experience translating for the State Department, the Embassy of Japan, the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC, and for multiple DC-based newspapers – but has also studied American Sign Language (ASL), German, Dutch, Italian, and French. She was the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC’s 2018 Tanaka Green Scholarship recipient for her studies at Kansai Gaidai University, as well as for her diachronic research on the aboriginal Ainu language of Japan. This past summer of 2019, Gabrielle was awarded a writ ...