Michael Freiling
Mike was born in San Francisco and grew up there. His interest in poetry was first kindled in the mid-’60s, when Mike attended high school just a few blocks north of the then-burgeoning Haight Ashbury district, where he was able to attend in-person readings by several of the poets of that time, including Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lenore Kandel.
Mike attended USF as an undergraduate before earning his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at MIT in 1977. While there, he helped co-found MIT’s literary magazine Rune and studied poetry under David Ferry at Wellesley. After receiving his PhD, Mike was named a Luce Scholar with an appointment to Kyoto University, where he completed his first draft translation of the Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology of classical Heian Period poetry.
In 2014, after a career in data science and artificial intelligence, Mike returned to Kyoto and resumed writing. He and his wife Satsuki Takikawa co-translated They Never Asked, an anthology of senryu poetry written by Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. His translation of the Hyakunin Isshu was published by Tuttle in 2025, some 46 years after the first draft. Today, Mike and Satsuki divide their time between Kyoto and Vancouver, Washington.
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