Date/Time
Date(s) - 12/04/2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center is pleased to welcome Karen Tei Yamashita as our final colloquium presenter of the year. She will share her story behind the creation of Brazil-Maru, a novel from immersive storytelling within Japanese communes in Brazil. Please join us on Thursday, December 4 at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. Refreshments will be served.
Title: “Listening for Story: Your Story In My Story”
One day I walked into a Japanese commune established in the rural interior of São Paulo state, where I met its leader and listened to his life story. I listened every day, all day, for one week. Thereafter, I left to visit a second commune where I expressed my admiration and fascination for his story, to which the folks in this commune declared: All lies! I would spend the next years meeting anyone who would share their version of the truth, the result being a work of fiction, Brazil-Maru.
My journey to writing is a story.
About our guest:
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 nine books traversing short story, memoir, and novel – published by Coffee House Press – including: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest; Brazil-Maru; Tropic of Orange; Circle K Cycles; Anime Wong; 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; Letters to Memory; Sansei and Sensibility; and Dark Soil (2024), a collection featuring eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction joined with ten stories by Yamashita that illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small in Santa Cruz, CA, creating a geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks. Most recently, she is the author of Questions 27 & 28 (Graywolf, 2026) a novel which offers a masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II.
In 2021, Yamashita was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. In the judges citation, David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors, observed, “In her various roles as a public intellectual—author, lecturer, teacher, mentor—Yamashita models a deep desire to understand and to embrace life as she finds it. Her body of work has been credited with transforming the approach toward Asian American literary and cultural studies from one that is U.S.-centric to one that is hemispheric and transnational. In prose brimming with electric narrative energy, she employs humor, politics, sardonic wit, and lush polyvocality to invite readers into her nuanced but accessible literary worlds; her writing evinces a breathtaking capacity to transform conventions in genre, voice, intertextuality, and characterization.”
In 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In March 2024 The Atlantic published “The Great American Novels: A New List of the Most Consequential Novels of the Past 100 Years” which included—among the likes of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison—Yamashita and her novel, I Hotel.
Yamashita is the recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship. Her awards include the California Book Award, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and multiple Association for Asian American Studies Book Awards.
Yamashita was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to São Paulo for research on the extensive history of Japanese immigration to Brazil where she remained for a decade. While there, Yamashita formed a study of Japanese Brazilian agricultural life, conducting interviews with Japanese immigrants, their descendants, and members of a commune. On her return to Los Angeles in 1984, Yamashita worked on translations and screenplays, and produced dramatic works such as Hannah Kusoh: An American Butoh, Tokyo Carmen vs. L.A. Carmen, and Noh Bozos, which she has linked to the content and style of her novel Tropic of Orange.
She is currently professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
