Administrative Assistant
Born in 1964, David Jacobson has been studying Japanese since he was 17. He has worked as a journalist in Japan and the United States, as a translator and interpreter, as a writer (in Japanese) for Japanese media, and as an editor and marketer for book publisher Chin Music Press. He is the author of Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, a picture book featuring the beloved Japanese children’s poet. It won an honorable mention in the children's literature category of the Freeman Book Awards, which recognize books for children and young adults that contribute to an understanding of East and Southeast Asia. Most recently, he was chair of the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative’s Translated YA Book Prize, which recognizes outstanding books for youth from all over the world that have been translated into English.
In addition to Japanese, he has studied French, Hebrew, Yiddish, and German and has dabbled in Mayan hieroglyphics (which, in consisting of both phonetic and pictographic components, are remarkably like kanji).
His favorite kanji compound is 泥人 鷚露巣, which he created to represent his original name David Gross by painstakingly paging through Nelson’s yomi index. The characters break down as follows:
泥人 (デビト: "mud man")
鷚露巣 (グロス: "skylark’s dewy nest")
The kanji for skylark is so obscure that most online dictionaries don't include it.
