First Generation Spotlight: Lawson Fusao Inada

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The organizers of the 2011 APIA Spoken Word Poetry Summit made it a priority to create an inter-generational dialogue.  Part of the strategy was to invite four first generation guests, who have had many years of impacting APIA performance poetry and community activism.  We have posted extensive bios and a special message from three of our first generation guests: Joe Kadi, David Mura, and Brenda Wong Aoki.  Here is the last but certainly not the least.

Born in Fresno, California, in 1938, Inada is a third-generation Japanese American. His father was a dentist and his mother a teacher, and his maternal grandparents founded the Fresno Fish Market in 1912. In 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Inada and his family were sent to internment camps with his parents and grandparents—first to the Fresno County Fairgrounds Assembly Center; then to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta; and, finally, to Amache Camp in the Colorado desert.

In 1971, Inada’s Before the War: Poems as They Happened was the first volume of poetry by an Asian American published by a major publishing house. By then, Inada had earned a master of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon and had been teaching at Southern Oregon College (now Southern Oregon University) for five years. He is the author of two other collections of poetry: Legends from Camp (1992), which won the American Book Award, and Drawing the Line (1997), which won an Oregon Book Award.

In addition to these individual publications, Inada has written critical introductions to a number of works, such as John Okada’s No-No Boy.

He is also a contributing editor for the Northwest Review and was the narrator for PBS specials on “Children of the Camps” and “Conscience and the Constitution.” In 2004 he was one of only 185 artists, scholars and scientists chosen from a nationwide pool of 3,200 applicants to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently serving as the Steinbeck chair for the National Steinbeck Center, a forum established to promote a community-wide celebration of literature in the tradition of John Steinbeck.

Inada has been recognized by the President of the United States, appearing at the White House in “A Salute to Poetry and American Poets.” Inada served as Oregon’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2010.

In 1997, he was awarded a Creative Arts Grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and his work has been the subject of a documentary titled “What It Means to Be Free: A Video about Poetry and Japanese-American Internment” and an award-winning animated film of “Legends from Camp” made in collaboration with his son, artist Miles Inada.

Lawson’s special message to the Summit:  “I look forward to the expedition that will scale Mt. Minneapolis to the very Summit.  But who will plant which flag?  And where to go from there?”

First Generation Spotlight: Brenda Wong Aoki

Three time NEA Theater Fellow, Brenda Wong Aoki writes and performs monodramas. Her intense lyrical song/dance/dramas are drawn from her grandfather’s memories of San Francisco during the Great Earthquake, Kabuki legends and her own personal life experience. Aoki’s multidisciplinary performances weave together Japanese Noh, Kyogen Theater, Commedia Dell’arte, movement and voice. She has performed in such venues as the Kennedy Center, New Victory Theater on Broadway, Hong Kong Performing Arts Center, the Adelaide International Festival in Australia, the Esplanade in Singapore, the Graz Festival Austria and the International House in Tokyo.

Brenda’s plays have been produced world-wide: Mermaid, a work for symphony, was commissioned by Maestro Kent Nagano, the award-winning Queen’s Garden was published by Routledge Press and produced at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend was the American representative to the Adelaide International Festival, Australia, Random Acts was produced by the Dallas Theater Center, Kuan-Yin: Our Lady of Compassion was commissioned by the Hong Kong International Festival and performed at the Esplanade in Singapore, and Obake: Tales of Spirits Past and Present was presented at the Kennedy Center and on Broadway at the New Victory Theater. Her CD recordings of The Queen’s Garden and Tales of the Pacific Rim were awarded Indie Awards for Best Spoken Word. Her book/CD Mermaid Meat was released in Tokyo 2008 and her most recent recording Legend of Morning, was released in 2009. She is currently developing a pageant play with world musicians and dancers about the lost continent of MU to premiere in 2012.

Brenda has deep roots in San Francisco. Her paternal grandfather was a founder of Japantown in the 1890’s, and her maternal grandmother was vice president of the first Chinatown garment union in the 1920’s. She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, ASCAP and the Western Arts Alliance. Brenda is a trustee of the Museum of Performance and Design in San Francisco and is an active member of the National Recording Academy. A founding member of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Aoki continues to teach and perform internationally.

Her message to the Summit:

“I am honored to be considered a “first generation” API writer and look forward to the energy and passion of all the young writers at this summit.”

Summit reflection: Hanalei Ramos

For what it’s given me as an artist and community member, I love what every Summit brings.

Flashback to 2005. Hurricane Katrina hits the Gulf Coast with such insistence homes and communities are swallowed by the floods. A small group of friends, fresh from the Boston APIA Spoken Word and Poetry Summit, organize an event called RELIEF: A Benefit for APIA Survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The night becomes an incredible line-up of writers, singer/songwriters, and other performers donating their time and packing about 500 people into the ImaginAsian theater. Soon, artists/former Summit participants from the Los Angeles and the Bay Area throw fundraisers, too. Together, we raise something like six or seven thousand dollars in donations for Southeast Asian communities in Mississippi and Louisiana.

The same group of friends who organized the NYC Katrina Benefit begin organizing a monthly open mic. This gradually evolves into the SULU Series, first at Galapagos (when it was still in Williamsburg), then at the Bowery Poetry Club in the Lower East Side. The total 50+ SULU Series shows between 2005 and 2010 created a lively and dynamic platform for up-and-coming APIA artists of various disciplines to face the loving kindness of an ultimate audience of thousands. While the NYC SULU Series is no longer, the DC SULU series was born in 2010 out of the same need: good folks believed in the importance of an APIA arts performance venue. (AndI also like to think that the DC-based 2009 Bay Area Summit attendees had a little something to do with it, too…)

I tell you this shortened story in this way because an APIA performing arts venue in two cities is the direct result of the inspiration, empowerment, and general magic generated by Summits past. The SULU Series is just one response by a group of spoken word artists and poets in a specific region, at a specific time. But without the Summit community, we wouldn’t have been able to respond to Hurricane Katrina with such timeliness. And a good hundred APIA artists might have never met a crowd as wonderful as a SULU Series audience on a Sunday night at the Bowery. What Summit created was essential for the growth of NYC, its audience, and every artist who blessed that stage.

So, dear reader, I ask you these questions: how do you use your art/writing/discipline to propel the needs of your community? How can you help develop the trajectory of APIA arts in your area? How does your work engage your community?

The Summit remains a place where our ideas grow the legs to run, the arms to hold up a beautiful people, and the eyes to see our own work as significant contributions to the evolution of APIA art. For this space and for you, I am, and always will be, grateful.

Hanalei Ramos is a writer, cultural worker, and community organizer. She was also a lead coordinator/organizer for the 2007 APIA Spoken Word & Poetry Summit in New York City.

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai on 10 years of Summit community

It’s been really powerful to see how the Summit community has grown and changed over the last 10 years. I could have never guessed when I was a Summit participant in 2001 that so many people that I met there would grow to be some of my closest friends, confidants, and creative collaborators for the next decade. At the Summits in both Seattle in 2001 and Chicago in 2003, I remember how we brought the poetry cipher out onto the street well after the venues had kicked us out. It didn’t matter. The fire, the heat, the urgency, the need, and the sheer joy of APIA poets and activists coming together to vibe, to spit, to be together, to grow — this I carry with me as we propel forward into the years and challenges to come.

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, spoken word poet