About me
Paul Yamazaki has been a bookseller at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers since 1970. He has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers for more than 50 years. Yamazaki has served on the board of directors of several literary and community arts organizations, among them are the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), Small Press Distribution (SPD), and the Kearney Street Workshop (KSW). He was once a member of the jury that selected the 21 writers that were included on the Granta Best Young American Novelists 2 that was published in the spring of 2007. Yamazaki participated as a panelist in The Translation Market, a world literature and translation summit, and as a delegate of American booksellers invited to attend the Beijing Book Fair. He has also participated at the Oxford Conference for the Book at the University of Mississippi, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Jaipur Literary Festival. Yamazaki was on the jury for the 2014 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was a recipient of the Litquake Barbary Coast Award.
Yamazaki has worked with the following organizations: the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund, Ford Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, American Booksellers Association, Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, National Book Foundation, Creative Work Fund, and many others.