Alum Janice Mirikitani to Give Poetry Reading at UCLA

RAFU SHIMPO -- The UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s Dr. Sanbo and Kazuko Sakaguchi Endowment presents Janice Mirikitani reading from and signing “Out of the Dust: New and Selected Poems” on Thursday, January 15, at noon. Drawing from her background as a Sansei and written in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the poems seek to explicate the connections of our humanity to the reactionary profiling of people of Middle Eastern descent and different ethnicities, comparing these choices to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Mirikitani was a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission and is the recipient of more than 40 awards and honors, including the Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women and Families’ Minerva Award, San Francisco State University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce’s Lifetime Achievement Ebbie Award and the American Book Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.