Erika Hayasaki

Picture of Erika Hayasaki
Associate Professor of Literary Journalism
School of Humanities
University of California, Irvine
403 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 2650
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Abstract
Erika Hayasaki teaches in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. She is an independent journalist interested in the intersections of identity, family, science, history, and the human condition. 

She is the author of The Death Class: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family, (Algonquin Books, Hachette, 2022). Somewhere Sisters was named an NPR Best Book of 2022 and received a 2023 Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting, honoring books about social and environmental justice.

Erika's feature stories appear in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic, The Cut, The Verge, MIT Technology Review, Slate, The New Republic, The Guardian, Newsweek, Time, Glamour, Elle, InStyle, Marie Claire, Foreign Policy, and others. She is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nine years covering breaking news and writing narratives.

She was a 2021-2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow, researching intersections of Black and Asian American history, and a 2018 Alicia Patterson Fellow in science and environmental reporting. Erika teaches courses on health, medical and science narratives, news feature writing, reporting on identity and social issues, and multimedia storytelling.

She has won awards from the Association of Sunday Feature Editors, and the Society for Features Journalism, the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Her science writing has been featured in Longform's Best of Science writing 2016 and 2017, and notably selected in the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019 and 2022. 
Publications
Last updated
01/24/2024