Marynbsp;Yukari Waters is half Japanese and half Irish-American.nbsp;The recipient of an O. Henry award, a Pushcart Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has been published in The Best American Short Stories 2002 and 2003, The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize, and Francis Ford Coppola'snbsp;Zoetrope 2nbsp;anthology. She earned her MFA from the University of California , Irvine , and lives in Los Angeles .