Susan Ito (author of I Would Meet You Anywhere) in conversation with Suzanne Kamata
Time: Saturday, July 27, 2024, 2:00-4:00PM
Place: Kyoto Ryukoku University, Omiya Campus, East Building, Room 302 (Building 10 on the link below.)
https://www.ryukoku.ac.jp/english2/about/access/omiya.html
(As an opening act, Ito’s students from Northeastern University will share some of their writing generated in Kyoto.)
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The critically acclaimed Susan Ito will be accompanied on her visit to Kyoto from northern California by students on her writing course. Susan specialises in memoir. Managing the event will be our own Suzanne Kamata, also a memoirist and well-known to WiK for her many articles and award-winning book. This will be a special chance for members to interact with others who have a keen interest in writing.
The presenters write that, ‘Several years ago, Susan Ito and Suzanne Kamata were co-fiction editors of an online journal called literarymama.com. Now, they meet again here in Japan, where they will discuss Susan’s recently published memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, about being a biracial individual raised by adoptive Japanese American parents, and finding her Japanese birth mother, and white birth father’s family. Susan will read a few brief excerpts. They will also talk about writing in general, and Susan’s connection to Japan, and there will be plenty of time for questions.’
The following is taken from an interview by Leslie Lindsay in the Hippocampus Magazine ..
“Susan is a ‘hanbun-hanbun’ (half-and-half) Japanese-Caucasian writer adopted at just several months of age by a Japanese couple in New Jersey. Her mother, in her Bronx accent, often said ‘the place you came from, where you got you ;’ Susan knew she was adopted, but she didn’t know anything about her birth parents.
Susan’s work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and has been awarded residences at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the U.S. Susan lives in Northern California and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University, and Bay Path University.”
