FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2, 2008
News
The Otterbein College Department of English and The Ohio State University's Asian American Studies Program will each host a presentation of Calls to Remembrance: Commemorating Japanese American Internment through the Lives and Writings of Toyo Suyemoto and Lawson Inada. The Otterbein College presentation will be held at 4 p.m. on Jan. 29, 2008, in the Philomathean Room of Towers Hall, 1 S. Grove St., Westerville. The Ohio State University presentation will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2008, in the Frank W. Hale Jr. Black Cultural Center, 153 W. 12th Ave., Columbus.
Following the outbreak of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that resulted in the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States. Suspected of harboring loyalties to Japan due to their racial affinity, these individuals were removed en mass from their homes and relocated to camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. The U.S. government has since apologized for this violation of civil liberties, yet this painful episode remains understudied in our school curriculum.
The presentation will feature the short film, A Day of Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami Remembers Internment, a reading from Toyo Suyemoto's recently published memoirs, I Call to Remembrance by editor Susan B. Richardson, retired professor of English at Otterbein College and Denison University, and a reading by author Lawson Inada.
Toyo Suyemoto (1916-2003), a writer who was imprisoned in an internment camp, has been described as the Japanese American "poet laureate." After World War II, she moved first to Cincinnati and then Columbus, where she befriended literary scholars in the area and frequently gave guest lectures at Otterbein College. She also worked for over 20 years at The Ohio State University, becoming the head librarian of the Social Work Library. Toyo retired from Ohio State as associate professor emerita in 1985 and donated her extensive papers to the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection there shortly before she passed away.
Lawson Inada, also as internee and the current poet laureate of Oregon, is a pioneering Asian American author who combines his love of jazz with poetry. His collection, Before the War: poems as they happened (1971) was the first volume of poetry by an Asian American published by a major publishing house. He is the author of two other collections of poetry: Legends from Camp (1993), an American Book Award winner, and drawing the line(1997). He is co-editor of two important anthologies of Chinese American and Japanese American literature: Aiiieeeee! (1983) and The Big Aiiieeee! (1991) and editor of only what we could carry: The Japanese Internment Experience (2000). Many of his poems have been written specifically for performance and he has performed his work with musical groups and soloists, including such jazz greats as Mal Waldron and Andrew Hill.For more information about commemorations, please contact Otterbein Professor Jim Gorman at jgorman@otterbein.edu.
