Mizuko: True Spirit; meet artist Art Nomura

by | Jan 15, 2025 | American Harvest, Classes & Events, Featured, Lament in the Night, Minor Feelings, Phone Booth at the Edge

Mizuko: True Sprit – Meet Artist and Writer Art Nomura

Saturday, February 8, 2024, 2 pm

“Mizuko: True Spirit” is an epic American-immigrant tale of hardship, assimilation, and the eventual triumph that ensued. When the Takahashi’s, one of the wealthiest families in western Japan lost their great fortune in 1900, five-year old Mizuko Takahashi went from riches to rags. Mizuko’s lifetime in Japan and America offers the reader an intimate look into the world of an Asian immigrant. This book is the story of one woman’s efforts to surmount racism, sexism, and poverty in the 20th century. Featured is a riveting accounting of the matriarch’s life in Manzanar Concentration Camp for three years beginning in 1942.

Art Nomura will share his book, the creative process of memoir writing, and inspiration for his work.

Art Nomura has worked as a painter, sculptor, potter, filmmaker, writer, and New Media artist since 1968. Several of his works have themes directly connected to the Asian American experience. His work has screened on PBS, cable, and in festivals, galleries, museums, and universities worldwide. Nomura has taught media production and writing since 1981.He is Professor Emeritus in Film/TV Production at the School of Film and Television, Loyola Marymount University.

RSVP for this free event.

J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

J-Sei’s Virtual Book Club: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

by | May 27, 2021 | Classes & Events, JSei Book Club, Minor Feelings

Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today. Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen,
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer

 

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

by Cathy Park Hong

As Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month comes to a close, J-Sei’s Book Club summer selection is MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING by poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. After its debut in Spring 2020, this collection of seven essays became an instant classic, presenting a blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and history to examine racialized consciousness and truth in America today. Unifying these essays is Hong’s evocation of “minor feelings,” that disturbing yet familiar experience of having one’s own perception of reality discredited or marginalized by others. In this time of social change and racial justice, Hong’s timely, candid, and subversive book challenges all of us to reconsider notions and assumptions that we grew up with as well as thinking about what we can do, as individuals and as a community, moving forward.

Join the Club, Buy the Book

Sign up for J-Sei’s Book Club and be added to the Book Club mailing list. Please encourage anyone interested to join! Our book discussion will be even further enriched by a diverse range of perspectives, for instance of different ages, races, and gender identities.

Copies of the newly issued paperback edition are available for purchase from Eastwind Books, which Eastwind is very generously offering to Book Club members at a discounted price. Order the book online through Eastwind and type JSEI in the coupon field at cart checkout to get your 10% discount. Also, you can choose to pick up your copy at the store or arrange for shipping, or you can designate J-Sei for delivery/pick-up by typing your request into the Note to Seller comment box at cart checkout.

Book Club Format: Read the book at your own pace. As you’re reading, you can comment online about whatever strikes you and share with fellow Book Club members on the secure J-Sei Book Club webpage. In addition, once a week for seven weeks, I’ll update the Book Club webpage to focus on one of Hong’s essays. At the end of July we’ll schedule a live Zoom meeting so members can get together to discuss the book.

— Kathy Hashimoto, moderator

 

About the Author

Cathy Park Hong was raised in Los Angeles. She graduated from Oberlin College and has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, Engine Empire (2012), Dance Dance Revolution (2007), and Translating Mo’um (2002). Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and is a full professor at Rutgers University.