Hiromi Ito, Jeffrey Angles, Reese Okyong Kwon Reading
Department: Intl. Center for Writing and Trans.
Date and Time: May 9, 2011 | 5:00 PM-6:00 PMEvent Location: 135 Humanities Instructional Building
Event Details
"She Writes Between Here and There"
Presented in partnership with the Asian American Literary Review
In the 1980s, Hiromi Ito wrote a series of collections about sexuality, childbirth, and women's bodies in such dramatically new and frank ways that she is often credited with revolutionizing postwar Japanese poetry, which is why Anne Waldman calls her “a true sister of the Beats.” She has earned and been nominated for many of Japan’s top literary awards, which include the Takami Jun prize for Wild Grass on the Riverbanks, a nomination for the Akutagawa prize with House Plant, and the Hagiwara Sakutaro prize for the novel The Thorn-Puller. She currently splits her time between Encinitas and Japan. Since moving to the U.S., her work has focused on migration and the psychological effects of linguistic and cultural alienation.
Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor of Japanese and translation studies at Western Michigan University. His book of Hiromi Ito translations, Killing Kanoko (Action Books), was a finalist for Three Percent’s best translation book of poetry. His book of Tada Chimako translations, Forest of EyesI (U Cal Press), earned a Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for translation. He has also earned translation grants from PEN and the NEA. His book Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature just came out from the University of Minnesota press.
Reese Okyong Kwon is one of Narrative's ‘30 Below 30’ emerging writers. She has scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony and publications in places such as The Kenyon Review, The Sun, American Short Fiction, The Believer, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She was raised in Cerritos and currently lives in Washington, DC.