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Woman. Warrior. Writer. Kate Murayama

Meet October’s Woman. Warrior. Writer. Kate Murayama!  Kate Maruyama’s novel, Harrowgate was published by 47North. Her novella Family Solstice named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine is out from Omnium Gatherum. Her novella Halloween Beyond: The Gentleman’s Suit is out this October from Crystal Lake, and her literary novel Alterations is upcoming from Running Wild Press.

How did you come to author your life?

I have always written, from novel to screenplay to novel to stories to novels. But it seems every time I sit down to write, I’m writing toward the question of love in all its human varieties. The questions keep me going: What do we do when our beloved dies but doesn’t leave? How far will we go to keep them with us? (Harrowgate) How can ancestral greed come before familial love and what does a loving innocent child do, caught in the crosshairs? (Family Solstice) How do we make peace when a friend slips away? (Halloween Beyond) Alterations examines how going against love can have repercussions through three generations of a family. Lifelong friendship is the question my next work is pushing toward.

Kate Murayama’s website provides resources and articles on allyship, whiteness, and privilege.

This is an excellent resource and a solid demonstration of how we might try to share and learn from each other.  Intersectionality as put forth by scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a key to changing the lives of women as a collective.

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Blog Educators Reading Reading & Writing Teachers Woman Warrior Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Natashia Deón

Meet September’s Woman Warrior Writer Natashia Deón!

Natashia Deón is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, a practicing criminal attorney, and author of the critically acclaimed and widely-reviewed novels, The Perishing and GRACE, named a Best Book by The New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Professor of creative writing at Yale, UCLA, and Antioch University, her essays have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed and other places. Deón founded REDEEMED, a criminal record clearing and clemency project that pairs professional writers and lawyers with those who have been convicted of crimes.

How did you come to author your life?

I came to author my life first as a lawyer and then again as a PEN America Fellow while I was completing my first novel GRACE. As a Fellow, I began teaching creative writing for 826LA and in high schools throughout Los Angeles. That fellowship changed the course of my life immeasurably.

Follow Natashia’s links & socials for updates on her writing, activism and life!  www.natashiadeon.com@natashiadeon (IG, Twitter, FB)

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Blog Educators Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Meet August’s Woman.Warrior. Writer. Marie Myung-Ok Lee!

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American author of Somebody’s Daughter and The Evening Hero—a novel that focuses on the future of medicine, immigration, and North Korea. Lee has widely published across news outlets, won fellowships to Yaddo/Macdowell, is a founder of the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, and teaches at Columbia University.

How did you come to author your life?

Even while growing up in a Christian household in an all-white rural area I knew I was Buddhist-leaning non Christian at age 9, about the same time I declared I was going to be a writer for a living.  At 9, I started meditating even though I didn’t have the words for what I was doing. But I just knew doing both writing and meditating every day would lead to…something. Also, parenting my intellectually disabled, medically fragile son for 20+ years, I just show up for him, including for all the disasters and emergencies, Interestingly he has started communicating–at the same time my 18-years-in-the-making novel is finally coming out. You can’t do everything in a day, but you can commit to doing what ever “it” is, daily, like writing, parenting, being present. 

About The Evening Hero as a Buzz PICK Good Morning America Book Club selection Marie Lee says: “I think this is a good illustration go what doing something every day, even without promise of reward, can do.”

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Blog Educators Poetry Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Lisa Kwong

Meet July’s Woman. Warrior. Writer. Lisa Kwong!

A native of Radford, Virginia, Lisa Kwong is AppalAsian, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, and the author of Becoming AppalAsian(Glass Lyre Press). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and other publications. She teaches at Indiana University and Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana.

To preview Kwong’s poems, check out these links:

http://www.stilljournal.net/lisa-kwong-poetry.php

http://www.stilljournal.net/lisa-kwong-poetry2021.php

How did you come to author your life?

I belong to many different communities; I also don’t belong anywhere sometimes. I’ve been the daughter of laborers in a room of professors’ and doctors’ kids or the “fat” one in a group of petite Asian women. I know the pain of being unseen, unheard, and misunderstood.

Through writing, I want to honor my family, to make sense of being an Asian from Appalachia, to celebrate, to mourn, to heal. I hope that my work can inspire others to be proud of who they are and where they come from. Writing gave me a voice when I didn’t have one. I hope it can help others to speak up for themselves, too.

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Blog Educators Reading Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Artress Bethany White

Meet April’s Woman Warrior Writer Artress Bethany White, a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019) and author of Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020). She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania.

How did you come to author your life?

I came to author my life when I accepted my first university teaching position. I was already living in New York and describing myself as a writer. I was working as a coordinator for New York University’s executive MBA program and I was earning a livable wage. Then someone approached me about a teaching job at Long Island University. Intuitively, I knew that this was going to be a game-changer for me, and it was. That first job propelled me into completing a master’s degree and a Ph.D., and became the perfect career companion to my life as a writer. I love what I do!

 

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Blog Reading & Writing Teachers Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Grace Cho

January 2022’s Woman Warrior Writer is Grace Cho. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (2021), a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame Secrecy and the Forgotten War(2008), which won the American Sociological Association’s Asia and Asian America Section book award in 2010. She lives in New York City with her partner, kids and chosen family, and she teaches sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

How did you come to author your life?

My former teacher, the incomparable bell hooks, wrote in Theory as Liberatory Practice, “I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me.” Writing for me has always been about theorizing, about theory as “a location for healing.” As a young adult, I began writing to make sense of all the injustices my mother faced, all the ways in which her history had been obscured or erased or made into an object of shame and contempt.  As her daughter, it became my business to denounce that shame and celebrate her legacy.

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Newsletter 

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