Readings

Saturday June 11 1:30pm-2:30pm

National Center for Democracy

Tateuchi Democracy Forum

Susan Straight was born in Riverside and still lives there with her family. (She can actually see the hospital from her kitchen window, which her daughters find kind of pathetic; most days, she walks the dog past the classroom where she wrote her first short story at 16, at Riverside City College, which they find even more sad.) She has published seven novels and one middle-grade reader. Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001; A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006.  She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on Highwire Moon, and a Lannan Prize was an immense help when working on Take One Candle Light a Room.

Nina Revoyr was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father, and grew up in Tokyo, Wisconsin, and Los Angeles. She is the author of four novels.  Southland, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and “Best Book of 2003,” a Book Sense 76 pick, an Edgar Award finalist, and the winner of the Ferro Grumley Award and the Lambda Literary Award. The Age of Dreaming, was a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  Nina’s latest novel, Wingshooters, published is “Remarkable…[an] accomplished story of family and the dangers of complacency in the face of questionable justice,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Jamie Moore is studying for her MFA in Fiction at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She received her BA degree from Sonoma State University in Liberal Studies and Creative Writing. She has worked for Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative. “Crayon Colors” was just published in the Fall 2010 issue of Moonshot Magazine. She was born, raised and still resides in Santa Rosa, CA, where she writes the blog Mixed Reader.

Esmé-Michelle Watkins was raised in Upland, California. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and a practicing real estate litigation attorney. She currently lives in San Francisco, California.

Sunday June 12 1:00pm-2:30pm

National Center for Democracy

Tateuchi Democracy Forum

Zosimo Quibilan, Jr. won the 2006 Philippine National Book Award for Short Story and the 8th Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award in 2008 for Pagluwas (Going to the City) published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2006.  He lives in South Pasadena, CA with his wife and three kids.

Sarah Culberson is a biracial American woman of Mende ancestry from Sierra Leone on her father’s side. She is the biological daughter of one of Sierra Leone’s 149 chiefdoms. Culberson was adopted one year after her birth by a West Virginia couple and was raised in the United States with little knowledge of her ancestry.  In 2004, Culberson hired a private investigator to track down her roots, and discovered that her father was in fact a prince. Since then, Culberson has established the Kposowa Foundation to alleviate the suffering endured by her people.  She has worked with CONTRA-TIEMPO, a dance group whose goal is to fuse various forms of dance in their performances and create forms of dance that reach audiences without regard to social boundaries.  She is the author of A Princess Found.

Danzy Senna was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is the daughter of the author Carl Senna (The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights,) a black poet of Mexican heritage who came from a struggling single-parent household, and Fanny Howe, an Irish-American poet and novelist born into privilege. They met and married while both were activists during the American Civil Rights Movement.  Senna received her B.A. from Stanford University and MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards.  Her first novel, Caucasia, received the Book-of-the-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. It also received the Alex Award, American Library Association.  Her second novel Symptomatic (2003), is a psychological thriller narrated by a biracial young woman who is often mistaken for white.  In 2009 her memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History was published. Her short story collection You Are Free will be published in Spring 2011.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett Marie was born in California to a Japanese mother and American father. Her work has been published in the New  York Times, Glamour, The New Yorker online, and NPR. She has been a guest on All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation. Marie’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was published by Graywolf Press and was shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She received a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Adebe DeRango-Adem is a former research fellow at the Applied Research Center, home of ColorLines magazine, and current Cultural Editor of Race-Talk.org, a blog dedicated to writing on race politics and pop culture. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate, and is the author of Ex Nihilo (Frontenac House, 2010), her debut poetry collection which was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under thirty.  She recently edited, alongside Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications, 2010), an anthology that explores how mixed-race women identify in 21st century North America.