Luca Nakamura is a memoirist and translator whose work traces the fault lines between language, labor, and belonging. Raised between San Pedro, California, and Cuneo, Italy, by a shipyard electrician and a seamstress, Luca worked as a barback, copy-shop tech, and union organizer before earning an MFA in creative nonfiction from Portland State University. His essays have appeared in The Believer, Guernica, Orion, and Electric Literature, and his reporting on diaspora communities along the Great Lakes corridor has been taught in community journalism workshops. He is the recipient of the Cascadia Nonfiction Prize and a Detroit Arts fellowship.
Luca's first book, Liminal Hours (2021), explored night-shift economies and the poetics of maintenance. He has translated contemporary Japanese and Italian small-press zines into English and consults on bilingual oral-history projects. When not on the road, he splits his time between Detroit's Banglatown and Tangier, where he volunteers as a court interpreter and leads a narrative nonfiction lab at the Cinémathèque de Tanger. He lives with a rotating collection of found maps and a stubborn moka pot.
