Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Angie Sijun Lou and Karen Tei Yamashita for the launch of Dark Soil: Fictions and Mythographies—a new anthology edited by Lou and featuring ten new stories from Yamashita, all centered around Santa Cruz’s history, along with eight works of nonfiction from authors including Brandon Shimoda and Juliana Spahr.

About Dark Soil

Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten new stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small. Faced with a scant historical record in her urge to reconstruct the layered past of Santa Cruz, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction set amidst its architecture. Ten stories explore the California city to animate what might have been, to build the fullness of lives forgotten, and to honor their living with story and possibility. Following this impulse into the realm of nonfiction, eight other writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, these works use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.

Angie Sijun Lou is a Kundiman Fellow and a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her writings have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Joyland, Best Small Fictions, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Oakland.

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Purchase your own copy of Dark Soil at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Dark Soil

This event is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.