Betsy Aoki

As a poet, she has received grants from the City of Seattle and the Artist Trust Foundation, graduate poetry scholarships from the University of Washington, and a national scholarship from Writers' Conferences and Festivals.  She was a finalist for the 1997 Andres Berger Literary Award and the 2008 Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey award.

As a journalist, she penned the strangely popular "Planet Northwest" column for The Seattle Times' Pacific magazine, wrote book reviews for The Seattle Times' book page, and served as general assignment reporter for the Palm Beach post. As an intern, she reported for the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.

Known as Microsoft's "Blog Queen" for launching Microsoft's employee blogging sites, her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/betsya is not really the best example of nonfiction writing she can produce on deadline, but she blogs there to prove a point about corporate empowerment.