Join The Poet and the Silk Girl author Satsuki Ina and acclaimed graphic novelist Adrian Tomine for a conversation about the intergenerational impact of the Japanese American World War II incarceration experience. From the deep trauma of the past to the alarming and familiar turmoil of today’s political moment, they will discuss the power of art and family to foster understanding, healing, community, and societal change using Ina’s compelling memoir as a guide.
About the Book
In 1942, photojournalist Dorothea Lange captured an era-defining portrait of Shizuko Ina, concern etched across her brow, as she craned her neck waiting in line to register her family for forced removal in San Francisco. The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest is the story of the unimaginable future that came next for her and her family.
In this moving memoir, author Satsuki Ina—who was born to Shizuko in the Tule Lake Segregation Center—recovers the story of how her parents survived and resisted their incarceration in US concentration camps. Drawing from diary entries, haiku, censored letters, government documents, and clandestine messages, in addition to Ina’s own retrospective reflection, her multivocal memoir is a powerful testament to the traumatic legacies of state-sanctioned race-baiting and fearmongering, the temerity of the human spirit, and the fortifying succor of compassionate witnessing. Newly released in paperback, The Poet and the Silk Girl has been expanded to include a study and discussion guide.
Bios
Satsuki Ina
Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist specializing as a consultant in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim their voice and their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism includes co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. She produced two Emmy-award winning documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now!, and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Adrian Tomine
Adrian Tomine is the author of Shortcomings, Killing and Dying, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, Summer Blonde, and Sleepwalk and Other Stories. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film adaptation of Shortcomings, and stories from Killing and Dying and Summer Blonde were adapted into the film Paris, 13th District. Since 1999, his illustrations have appeared regularly on the cover and in the pages of The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughters.