Brenda Shaughnessy is a poet, mother, daughter, and teacher. She works at Rutgers University-Newark, and lives in West Orange, NJ. She was educated in NYC and Santa Cruz, CA, having grown up in Thousand Oaks, CA after an infancy in Wollaston, MA and Okinawa, where she was born at Kadena Air Base Hospital, United States Air Force, in 1970, to mother Mitsuko Higa, daughter of Yoshimoto Ushi and Higa Denko, of Yomitan.
