Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony; October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010)[1][2][3][4] was an American poet and educator who won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.

"[7] Ai, who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche, was born in Albany, Texas,[1][2][3][4][8][9] in 1947, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona.

She spent time also in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, living with her mother and second stepfather, Sutton Haynes.

In 1959, a couple of years after her mother's divorce from Hayes, they moved back to Tucson, Arizona, where she completed high school and attended college at the University of Arizona, where she majored in English and Oriental Studies with a concentration in Japanese and a minor in Creative Writing, to which she would fully commit toward the end of her degree.

[10] Before starting college, one night during dinner with her mother and third stepfather, Ai learned her biological father was Japanese.

Known as Florence Hayes throughout her childhood and undergrad years, it was not until graduate school, when Ai was going to switch her last name back to Anthony, that her mother finally told her more details about her past, learning that she had an affair with a Japanese man, Michael Ogawa, after meeting him at a streetcar stop.

[11] From 1969 to 1971, Ai attended the University of California at Irvine's M.F.A program where she worked under the likes of Charles Wright and Donald Justice.

[10][11] She is the author of No Surrender, (2010), which was published after her death, Dread (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003); Vice (1999), which won the National Book Award;[5] Greed (1993); Fate (1991); Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Killing Floor (1979), which was the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Cruelty (1973).

[citation needed] She also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College and from various universities.