Hawaiian Crown Plantation & Chocolate Factory

2017 Asian American Literary Festival

The Library of Congress hosted the concluding day of the groundbreaking Asian American Literature Festival. The day featured a lecture and reading by writer and American Book Award winner Karen Tei Yamashita titled, Literature as Community: the Turtle, Imagination, and the Journey Home. The afternoon session included a lecture by poet Kimiko Hahn on Angel Island: The Roots and Branches of Asian-American Poetry, and closed with a poetry reading.

Speaker Biography: Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of several books, including I Hotel, Anime Wong and Letters to Memory. 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 Award for Literature and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. A U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair in feminist critical race and ethnic studies, Yamashita is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Speaker Biography: Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poems, including Earshot, which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award and most recently, Brain Fever. Her other honors include a PEN/Voelcker Award for poetry, a Shelley Memorial Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in the Master's of Fine Arts program in creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

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