Lawrence Matsuda

My Name is Not Viola exemplifies what happens when historic racism and government policies intersect. Hanae Tamura strives to live a dignified life under undignified conditions. She manages to find balance even after being forcibly incarcerated twice: once in the WWII Minidoka, Idaho Concentration Camp without due process and again as a mental patient. Her lifelong quest to deal with the long-term consequences of America's betrayal is a must read for those who value liberty and justice for all. ----- The story of America's WWII concentration camps has been told from many angles, but never has the psychological trauma of reentry been presented with such heartbreaking intensity. We follow the young Hanae's journey from Seattle to prewar Hiroshima and back again, then suffer (and sometimes laugh) with her through the incarceration and its grueling aftermath against the tension of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Her life is a revealing chapter of the American experience. -Jay Rubin, author of The Sun Gods and translator for several Haruki Murakami novels. This story belongs to all of us who wish to experience the Japanese American heartbeat as it was forced to inhabit a humiliating and hope-sundered invitation to sink, and also, incredibly, for its humiliated sufferers, to absorb a silent mandate from their government to forgive what had been done to them. - Tess Gallagher, internationally known poet, fiction writer, film collaborator (Birdman, Short Cuts) and author of IS, IS NOT, poems from America and Ireland. Larry Matsuda's audacious novel enters into the mind of his mother as she lives through the traumas the twentieth century visited upon Seattle's Japanese community. With sensuous language and vivid imagery that sometimes verges on hallucinatory, we inhabit her world from a girlhood in old Japantown, through pre-war Hiroshima, the Minidoka concentration camp, and ultimately the haven of a mental institution, where she reclaims her life from the edge of suicide with the help of some most unlikely friends. This magical and life-affirming book is a beautiful addition to the epic story of the Japanese in America. - John Gordon Hill, Film Director

My Name Is Not Viola

Dunya Mikhail

Danez Smith

Jericho Brown

Ilya Kaminsky

Tiffany Midge

Rajiv Mohabir

Tanaya Winder

Gary Copeland Lilley

Anna Balint

Thomas Hubbard

Shankar Narayan

Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, edited by Seattle-based writers Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard, contains poems, stories and images from 117 writers and 53 artists, divided into five fluid and intersecting sections: Legacies, We Are Here, Why?, Evidence, and Resistance. We begin with Legacies because the current increased climate of hate in this country didn't begin with the 2016 election, and to find its roots we must look to U.S. history. Take a Stand, Art Against Hate Anthology comes at a critical time in our nation's cultural discourse surrounding intersections of identity, resistance, and looking at the past to forge a path forward. This collection spans form, tone, and theme without feeling cluttered; you find yourself reading something new while experiencing the same emotions many of us have come to find all too familiar. Thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, this collection flows seamlessly from poetry to visual art, creating an anthology that is not only a commanding and introspective read, but a necessary one. We can regard Take a Stand: Art Against Hate as a print-form peace march, an ongoing campaign for justice for all of the struggles embodied in these writings and depicted in the photos and artwork included here. This is a deeply democratic anthology-standing alongside nationally prominent voices such as Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Tess Gallagher, Ilya Kaminsky, Dunya Mikhail, Marge Piercy and Danez Smith, are luminaries renowned in this region and beyond, such as Kathleen Alcalá, Gary Copeland Lilley, Claudia Castro Luna, Melissa Kwasny, Priscilla Long, Tiffany Midge, and Gail Tremblay.

A Raven Chronicles Anthology

Take a Stand, Art Against Hate

Lawrence Matsuda

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