Letters to Memory

Letters to Memory is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, & Yamashita’s engagement with them, are a way for her to explore various aspects of the internment & to expand its meaning beyond her family, & our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, Orientalism, & community..

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, & Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award & awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, & the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow & co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. She is currently Professor Emeritus of Literature & Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.