Karen Tei Yamashita | |
|---|---|
 Yamashita receiving the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2021 | |
| Born | January 8, 1951 Oakland, California, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Carleton College |
| Notable awards | Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters |
Karen Tei Yamashita (born January 8, 1951) is an American writer.
Yamashita is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. Her works, several of which contain elements of magic realism, include novels I Hotel (2010), Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Yamashita's novels emphasize the necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an increasingly globalized age, even as they destabilize orthodox notions of borders and national/ethnic identity.
She has also written a number of plays, including Hannah Kusoh,Noh Bozos and O-Men which was produced by the Asian American theatre group, East West Players. [1]
In 2009, Yamashita received the Chancellor's Award for Diversity from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award. [2] In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists. [3] In 2013 she was co-appointed with Bettina Aptheker as the UC Presidential Chair in Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies; a position offered to distinguished members of the university's faculty intended to encourage new or interdisciplinary program development. [4]
Yamashita was named the recipient of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2021. [5]
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of the coastal community of Santa Cruz, the main campus lies on 2,001 acres (810 ha) of rolling, forested hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As of Fall 2023, its ten residential colleges enroll some 17,812 undergraduate and 1,952 graduate students. Satellite facilities in other Santa Cruz locations include the Coastal Science Campus and the Westside Research Park and the Silicon Valley Center in Santa Clara, along with administrative control of the Lick Observatory near San Jose in the Diablo Range and the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Adlai E. Stevenson College, known colloquially as Stevenson College, is a residential college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Currently, the college is host to the Linguistics Department, as well as many humanities faculty.
Denice Dee Denton was an American professor of electrical engineering and academic administrator. She was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bettina Fay Aptheker is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing feminist studies.
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Judith "Judy" Yung was a librarian, community activist, historian and professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in oral history, women's history, and Asian American history. She died on December 14, 2020, in San Francisco, where she had returned in 2018.
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Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is the first novel published by Japanese American author Karen Tei Yamashita. Primarily set in Brazil, the novel is often considered a work of magical realism but transgresses many literary genres as it incorporates satire and humor to address themes of globalization, transnationalism, migration, economic imperialism, environmental exploitation, socio-economic inequity, and techno-determinism. It follows a broad cast of characters across national borders, from Japan, Brazil, and the United States. The novel was written when Yamashita was in the United States after living nine years in Brazil.
Mary Rita Cooke Greenwood is an American academic and nutritionist.
Gary Eugene Young is an American poet, printer and book artist. In 2010, he was named the first ever Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit independent press based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The press’s goal is to "produce books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience." It is widely considered to be among the top five independent presses in the United States, and has been called a national treasure. The press publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Tropic of Orange is a novel set in Los Angeles and Mexico with a diverse, multi-ethnic cast of characters by Karen Tei Yamashita. Published in 1997, the novel is generally considered a work of magic realism but can also be considered science fiction, postcolonial literature, speculative fiction, postmodern literature, world literature, or literature of transnationalism.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella's career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella's research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Gina Dent is an associate professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Humanities Division at UC Santa Cruz. She co authored the 2022 book Abolition. Feminism. Now. with her partner, Angela Davis; Erica Meiners; and Beth Richie.
The Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz constitutes one of the oldest departments of gender and sexuality studies in the world. It was founded as a women's studies department in 1974. It is considered among the most influential departments in feminist studies, post-structuralism, and feminist political theory. In addition to its age and reputation, the department is significant for its numerous notable faculty, graduates, and students.
Jeffrey Conrad Stewart is an American Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, described as "a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired".
Petrofiction or oil fiction is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.
I Hotel is a 2010 novel by Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press. A novel about Asian American movements in the seventies, it is named after the International Hotel, a historic residential hotel in San Francisco that housed predominantly Filipino Americans in the 20th century, which is the setting for several of the book's sections. The book won several awards, including an American Book Award. It was reissued by Coffee House Press for its tenth anniversary in 2019, featuring an introduction by Jessica Hagedorn.
