Tony Koji Wallin-Sato
Contributor
Tony Koji Wallin-Sato is a carceral-impacted scholar and multi-ancestral Nisei poet. He is a co-facilitator for the national Soto Zen Buddhist Association affinity group Zen In Prisons (ZIP), the API Fellow for the Washington Prison History Project, in-prison teaching artist with the William James Association, and the 2026-2027 Mellon Indigenous Arts Graduate Fellow at University of Washington, where he is pursuing a PhD. From the ages of 13-24 he was in and out of various surveillance and carceral systems, experiencing juvenile hall, jails, and a correctional facility. He is the former director and co-founder of Project Rebound Cal Poly Humboldt (CPH), a lecturer in the Critical Race Gender and Sexuality Studies at CPH, and former prison education director at Project Rebound Cal State Long Beach. While at Humboldt, the Project Rebound team established the first BA program on a level 4 yard at Pelican Bay State Prison and received the first Pell Grant in the nation. He is lay ordained in the Suzuki Roshi lineage of Soto Zen and deeply inspired by Uchiyama Gudo. Museifu Kyōsan Kakumei.
