Lee Cataluna was born on Maui and raised in plantation houses in Wailuku, Kōloa, and Ka‘u. She was a 2004 recipient of the Elliot Cades Award for Literature and her first book, FOLKS YOU MEET IN LONGS AND OTHER STORIES, received the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association's Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for Excellence in Literature. Her play, Da Mayah , was included in the anthology HE LEO HOU, A NEW VOICE, which also received the Excellence in Literature Ka Palapala Po‘okela. After working for ten years in local television and radio, she became a columnist for The Honolulu Advertiser and currently writes for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser while a graduate student in… Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.