About Me

Leza Lowitz image

Leza Lowitz is a California girl who lives in Tokyo. Always willing to go to any length and travel any distance to discover who she was and how to be happy, she met her soulmate at a jazz club in Yokohama, and moved to Japan to be with him. Ten years later, Leza and Shogo undertook the crazy project of opening a yoga studio in Tokyo. Three years after that, they adopted a beautiful boy and rescued two dogs, starting a family in their mid-forties.

For over two decades, Leza has been bringing together the worlds of yoga and creativity at her popular yoga studio, Sun and Moon Yoga, and in over twenty best-selling books. Originally from San Francisco, she has been studying meditation, yoga and healing for over 35 years and teaching for over 25. Lowitz credits her yoga and meditation practice with deepening her creativity, discipline, and compassion. She considers yoga and writing to be life-saving tonics that offer amazing experiences of self-discovery, love, joy, creativity and community. 

Her breakout book, Yoga Poems: Lines To Unfold By, married her twin passions of yoga and poetry, and received the 2001 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. The companion book, Yoga Heart: Lines on the Six Perfections, is an exploration of the Buddha’s six gifts for a meaningful life. Here Comes the Sun (a yoga memoir about adapting and adopting in Japan), Up from the Sea, (a YA novel in verse about Japan’s 2011 tsunami), and Jet Black and the Ninja Wind, (a YA epic about the last female ninja’s fight to save her ancient tribe)—all were #1 amazon best-sellers.

Lowitz’s articles about yoga, self-transformation, and cross-cultural living have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Yoga Journal, Yoga Journal Japan, Yogini, Yoga International, Elephant Journal, Shambhala Sun, wanderlust.com, Asana, the Manifest-Station, Origin, Mantra, Glomad, Wingspan (ANA in-flight magazine) and more.

She has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Arts Council, PEN, and the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and others. Her award-winning poetry has been translated into Japanese, French, Spanish, Burmese and Farsi.

Lowitz has a B.A. in English Literature from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Creative Writing/ Japanese Literature from San Francisco State University. She has been a Lecturer in Literature and Writing at San Francisco State University, Rikkyo University, and the University of Tokyo. She is also a long-term member of SCBWI Japan.


Her work has also appeared in the following selected publications: