Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance, and most recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She received a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship and is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Living Writers Series Winter 2018:
Performing Women: Race, Art, and Space

Performing Women: Race, Art and Space features four contemporary writers/artists whose writing and art moves between multiple modes: poetry, prose, visual and textile arts, photography, film, dance, and improvisation to address questions of gender, sexuality, and race.  This series will explore the intersections of literature, writing and performance, and the ways that themes of nation, exile, trauma, and joy move through individual, collective and individual artistic practices.
This series will also feature three “Live Models,” in the form of master conversations/performances, mainly for the Creative/Critical (and other) graduate students, faculty, and the larger Cowell College Community.

Winter 2018 Schedule:
January 25th: Jennifer Tamayo
February 1st: Karen Tei Yamashita
February 15th: Duriel E. Harris
February 22nd: Cecilia Vicuña
March 15th: UCSC Creative Writing Program, Undergraduate Student Reading

This event is co-sponsored by the Porter College George Hitchcock Poetry Endowment, Laurie Sain Creative Writing Endowment, the Chicano Latino Research Center, Cowell College, Bay Tree Bookstore, the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth M. Puknat Literary Series Endowment, and Literature Department and Creative Writing Program.