Born and raised in Montgomery County, MD, Gabrielle Oliver is a graduate of Howard University with a BA in English and a Minor in Japanese Language; she also holds a diploma in Japanese Language and Culture from Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, Japan. A self-proclaimed linguist, Oliver is most proficient in Japanese – with experience translating for the State Department, the Embassy of Japan, the National Cherry Blossom Festival, the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC, and for multiple DC-based newspapers – but has also studied American Sign Language (ASL), German, Dutch, Italian, and French. She is the Japan-America Society of Washington, DC’s 2018-2019 Tanaka Green Scholarship recipient for her studies at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, as well as for her diachronic research on the aboriginal Ainu language of Japan. In the summer of 2019, she completed a writing fellowship with 7x NAACP Image Award-winning poet Nikki Giovanni on behalf of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.