Cedric Yamanaka was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is the recipient of the Helen Deutsch Fellowship for Creative Writing at Boston University, where he earned a Master's Degree in English. At the University of Hawaii, he received the Ernest Hemingway Memorial Award for Creative Writing.

His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, and he is the author of In Good Company, a collection of short stories published by the University of Hawaii Press. He is a recipient of the Cades Award for Literature and a past winner of the Honolulu Magazine Fiction Contest. Screen adaptations of his short stories have received awards at the Hawaii International Film Festival.