Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes acclaimed author Karen Tei Yamashita (I Hotel) to celebrate the launch of her new novel Questions 27 & 28—a masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. Yamashita will be in conversation with Alice Yang, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps.

Questions 27 & 28 reaches backward and forward from the time of the questionnaire, chronicling the individuals who arrived in the US from Japan at the turn of the century, their children who came of age during war and incarceration, and their descendants who lived in its aftermath. Yamashita mixes fact with fiction and layers genres from James Bond movies to haiku to oral history, transfiguring an enormity of archival research into a chorus of stories. With her signature wit and aplomb, she gives voice to laborers, artists, scholars, informants, and activists who, over three generations, defined an immigrant community.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of nine books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award. Recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she is Professor Emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Alice Yang is Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and currently co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. She specializes in memories of the Pacific War, Asian American history, race, gender, oral history, historical memory, and twentieth-century America. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (2007), Major Problems in Asian American History (2003, 2017) and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (2000). Her exhibit, Never Again is Now: Japanese American Women Activists and the Legacy of Mass Incarceration, appeared at UC Santa Cruz, the Watsonville Public Library and the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. She also has served as chair of the UCSC History Department and provost of Stevenson College at UCSC.

More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Karen Tei Yamashita

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.