ENGLISH/LITERARY

Karen Tei Yamashita

Organized by the SMC English Department

A Reading by Karen Tei Yamashita

Register: https://www.smc.edu/calendar/#event-details/b74cb18c-6d2a-4a1f-aee4-aead7e8dadfc

Karen Tei Yamashita was born in Oakland, California; her parents were both survivors of incarceration at the Topaz internment camp during World War II. Yamashita is the author of eight books traversing short story, memoir, and novel, including Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, Anime Wong, and I Hotel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. Her most recent publication, Sansei and Sensibility (2020), is a collection of buoyant and inventive stories where Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance – familial, cultural, emotional, artistic – really means. 

In 2021, Yamashita was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. Yamashita is also the recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship as well as the California Book Award, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, among others. 

She is currently professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.