A reading & conversation in partnership with Spokane Public Library. Colorado Book Award winner Brandon Shimoda reads from and discusses his creative nonfiction book about the lasting impact of Japanese American incarceration. This is part of the One Book, One Coast events.
Chosen as one of Booklist’s “Top Ten History Books of the Year,” The Afterlife Is Letting Go has been called “a stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.” In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.
Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.
About the author
Brandon Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow, and the author of books of poetry and prose, including The Afterlife is Letting Go (with City Lights, 2024), Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), The Grave on the Wall (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the co-editor of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014) and an anthology of poetry on WWII Nikkei incarceration. He currently lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College.
You can learn about the One Book, One Coast program here. The inaugural selection is George Takei’s graphic memoir, They Called Us Enemy, which is thematically linked to Brandon Shimoda’s work.
Catch up on reading and get your book copies through Spokane Public Library and Auntie’s Bookstore, or attend ACL’s Asian American Heritage Month events for a chance to win copies of Shimoda’s Afterlife is Letting Go and Takei’s They Called us Enemy!