Yuka Igarashi

Yuka Igarashi is an American editor and writer who has held editorial roles at Granta, Soft Skull Press, and most recently Graywolf Press. She also facilitated interviews with several authors including but not limited to Ruth Ozeki, Tao Lin, Rebecca Solnit, and André Aciman.

In 2015, Igarashi joined Catapult as a founder and magazine editor a few months before its launch in September. It published books, uploaded online content daily, hosted workshops for writers, and facilitated internet community through various programs. Upon her assumption of leadership there, Igarashi wanted to make use of her position to return to the press' identity as a "staple of the punk underground Lower East Side" from its earlier days by reprinting authors like Eileen Myles and Lynne Tillman and soliciting work from similar lineages of literature. In 2023, Catapult announced that it would be shutting down its magazine and workshop arms in order to focus exclusively on book publishing in its own imprint as well as Counterpoint and Soft Skull Press.

From 2017 to 2022, Igarashi series-edited the annual anthology, The Best Debut Short Stories, which is a collaboration between PEN America, Catapult Books, and the guest judges brought on to read and select from each year's pool of submissions.

In 2021, Igarashi left Soft Skull Press and was hired by Graywolf Press as an executive editor. Upon her hiring, longtime publisher Fiona McCrae remarked, "Yuka has been something of a trail blazer in founding Catapult magazine, as well as in her work championing new voices there and at Granta and Soft Skull Press". Since then, Igarashi has acquired and edited numerous works including those by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Shannon Sanders, and Yang Shuang-zi with translator Lin King. Her very first acquisition was Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives.

Igarashi has been featured in interviews and pieces by Poets & Writers, Epiphany, PEN America, and others.

Other In a 2021 piece for the New Yorker, Andrea Long Chu speculated that the character Kay, in Tao Lin's novel Leave Society, was based on Igarashi.