During the 1990s, Lowitz helped to bring many modern and contemporary Japanese poets and fiction writers into English for the first time. She was editor and co-translator (with Miyuki Aoyama and Akemi Tomioka) of the groundbreaking anthology of contemporary Japanese women poets, A Long Rainy Season: Contemporary Japanese Women’s Poetry (Volume 1, 1994), which introduced Western readers to the haiku and tanka (waka) of Fumi Saito, Yuko Kawano, Machi Tawara, Akitsu Ei and thirteen other contemporary poets. (Lowitz and Aoyama later published The Collected Tanka of Akitsu Ei with AHA Poetry Press.)

A Long Rainy Season’s companion volume, Other Side River: Free Verse (Volume 2, 1995) featured contemporary Japanese women free-verse poets in translation. It contains the work of three dozen Japanese women writers, including such well-known poets as Shiraishi Kazuko, Ishigaki Rin and Ibaragi Noriko, who appeared alongside emerging Korean-Japanese (Zainichi) poets Chuwol Chong, Kyong Mi Park and Ainu Poet Mieko Chikapp, among others. A Long Rainy Season and Other Side River reflect a variety of literary styles, presenting a political and social awareness of being female in Japan's male-centered society and offering Western readers a new perspective on the lives of contemporary Japanese women. In 1993, she collaborated with the shakuhachi master Christopher Yohmei Blasdel on a series of readings and musical performances from these anthologies throughout Northern California.

In 1995, Lowitz edited Manoa: Towards a Literature of the Periphery, an anthology of Japanese literature in translation which includes fiction by Kyoko Murata, Hiromi Itoh, Yoshiko Shibaki, Teru Miyamoto, and Ango Sakaguchi. In 2001, she edited Manoa: Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War, which contains essays by Donald Richie and Ishii Shinpei, last letters of kamikaze pilots (first-time publication in translation), testimonials from Taiwanese “Comfort Women,” voices of student nurses from Okinawa ordered to commit suicide, and war-related fiction and essays in translation by Mishima Yukio, Hayashi Kyoko, Dazai Osamu, Kijima Hajime and Yoko Ogawa. The volume also contains manga from Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa (translated by Frederik Schodt et al.), poetry by Tamura Ryuichi, Ayukawa Nobuo, Ko Un, Sagawa Aki, Ishigaki Choko, and war-related fiction by Mary Yukari Waters and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.

With Hisako Ifshin, in 2003 she translated the prison-camp haiku of World War II internee Itaru Ina which appeared in Modern Haiku and later in the Emmy Award-winning documentary film, From A Silk Cocoon directed by Satsuki Ina. With Ifshin and Ralph McCarthy, she also co-translated the poetry of pop sculptor/cultural icon Yayoi Kusama (Violet Obsession) in conjunction with 1998—1999 Kusama's solo exhibitions touring the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In 2004, Lowitz edited The Japan Journals 1947-2004 by Donald Richie, former curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art who is best known as a leading Western authority on Japanese film. The Japan Journals are sixty years of diary entries and photographs, including encounters with Yasunari Kawabata, D.T. Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, Toru Takemitsu and Bando Tamasaburo, and many others.

In 2008, Lowitz co-translated (with Shogo Oketani) America and Other Poems by Ayukawa Nobuo, war poems by Japan's foremost modernist poet. Ayukawa was the Japanese translator of T. S. Eliot and a founding member of the Arechi (Wasteland) school of modernist poetry and was also a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army who wished to desert. This book received the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature from The Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.

Lowitz first lived in Tokyo from 1989-1994, when she worked as a freelance writer/editor for The Japan Times and the Asahi Evening News and was an art critic for Art in America. She lectured in American Literature and writing at Rikkyo University and Tokyo University. She was a regular reviewer for KQED Radio’s Pacific Time, for whom she covered books on Asia and the Pacific Rim, and also covered books on Asia for The Japan Times and Manoa from 1991 to 2003.

Lowitz's creative writing explores the idea of place, displacement and "home," particularly for expatriate women. Her 2001 book Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By used the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali as a structure underpinning the author's personal quest into the spiritual life. With Reema Datta, she later co-authored Sacred Sanskrit Words for Yoga, Chant, and Meditation for Stone Bridge Press. She also writes short stories and essays. After a decade in America (1994-2004) she returned to Tokyo, where she opened a yoga studio. She is currently Fiction Editor for Kyoto Journal.

Lowitz received her M.A. in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in 1988 and her B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984, where she studied with poets Stan Rice and Robert Hass. She is married to the writer/translator Shogo Oketani.