“You should not be invisible”: An Interview with Mitsuye Yamada

Extract

Born on July 5, 1923, in Fukuoka, Japan, Mitsuye Yamada immigrated to the USA when she was three, and spent much of her childhood in Seattle, Washington. During World War II, her father was arrested for espionage, and, in 1942, she and the rest of her family were incarcerated at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. Yamada attended the University of Cincinnati and earned a BA from New York University and an MA from the University of Chicago. Yamada’s writings over six decades have focused on her Japanese American heritage and women’s and international human rights issues. Her first book of poems, Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976), recounts the experience of internment. Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988) continues the search for cultural heritage through poetry. The two volumes were later republished together as Camp Notes and Other Writings (1998).

In 1981, Yamada was featured as cosubject of the documentary film Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets, produced by Academy Award winners Allie Light and Irving Saraf, and broadcast nationally on PBS. In 1982, Yamada was awarded the Vesta Award from the Woman’s Building of Los Angeles, and, in 1984, she won a writer’s residency from Yaddo. With John Brander, she coedited a poetry anthology, The Webs We Weave (1986). She is the founder of Multicultural Women Writers of Orange County and she coedited with Sarie Sachie Hylkema, an anthology of the group’s work, Sowing Ti Leaves: Writings by Multicultural Women (1990).