Join JANM’s Discover Nikkei for the fifth annual virtual poetry reading with a powerful lineup of poets previously featured in Discover Nikkei’s Nikkei Uncovered: a poetry column, hosted by traci kato-kiriyama, author of Navigating With(out) Instruments. This event will feature poets Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, Erica Isomura, and Syd Westley who will reflect on writing in this current time.
Nikkei Uncovered: a poetry column is a space for the Nikkei community to share stories through diverse writings on culture, history, and personal experience. Curated by traci kato-kiriyama, the column features a wide variety of poetic form and subject matter with themes that include history, roots, identity; history—past into the present; food as ritual, celebration, and legacy; ritual and assumptions of tradition; place, location, and community; and love.
Bios
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, visual artist, educator, and the author of Common Grace and Ubasute. He teaches creative writing at Trinity College and University of Hartford. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship Award.
Erica Isomura
Erica Isomura is a writer-artist whose creative practice incorporates written language, drawing, bookmaking, and mixed-media art. She is working on a visual book which explores her family history on B.C.’s north coast. Her work has appeared in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration and elsewhere.
Syd Westley
Syd Westley is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work has been supported and/or published by Lambda Literary, The Adroit Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, and others. Westley is Yonsei, and their grandparents were incarcerated in Tule Lake and Minidoka. They also write music reviews at Syd Westly Music.