Karen Tei Yamashita
Award-winning Author
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- An Evening with Karen Tei Yamashita
Biography
“Karen Yamashita’s powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative.” —Publishers Weekly
“Karen Yamashita is playful and experimental; she loves spectacle and cultural complications.” —Vida: Women in Literary Arts
“Smart, funny and entrancing.” —NPR
Karen Tei Yamashita was born in Oakland, California; her parents were both survivors of incarceration at the Topaz internment camp during World War II. Yamashita is the author of nine books traversing short story, memoir, and novel – all published by Coffee House Press – including: Through the Arc of the Rain Forest; Brazil-Maru; Tropic of Orange; Circle K Cycles; Anime Wong; I Hotel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award; Letters to Memory; Sansei and Sensibility; and, most recently, Dark Soil (2024), a collection featuring eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction joined with ten stories by Yamashita that illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small in Santa Cruz, CA, creating a geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.
In 2021, Yamashita was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. In the judges citation, David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors, observed, “In her various roles as a public intellectual—author, lecturer, teacher, mentor—Yamashita models a deep desire to understand and to embrace life as she finds it. Her body of work has been credited with transforming the approach toward Asian American literary and cultural studies from one that is U.S.-centric to one that is hemispheric and transnational. In prose brimming with electric narrative energy, she employs humor, politics, sardonic wit, and lush polyvocality to invite readers into her nuanced but accessible literary worlds; her writing evinces a breathtaking capacity to transform conventions in genre, voice, intertextuality, and characterization.”
In 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In March 2024 The Atlantic published “The Great American Novels: A New List of the Most Consequential Novels of the Past 100 Years” which included—among the likes of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison—Yamashita and her novel, I Hotel.
Yamashita is the recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship. Her awards include the California Book Award, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and multiple Association for Asian American Studies Book Awards.
Yamashita was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to São Paulo for research on the extensive history of Japanese immigration to Brazil where she remained for a decade. While there, Yamashita formed a study of Japanese Brazilian agricultural life, conducting interviews with Japanese immigrants, their descendants, and members of a commune. On her return to Los Angeles in 1984, Yamashita worked on translations and screenplays, and produced dramatic works such as Hannah Kusoh: An American Butoh, Tokyo Carmen vs. L.A. Carmen, and Noh Bozos, which she has linked to the content and style of her novel Tropic of Orange.
She is currently professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Short Bio
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of nine books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, Dark Soil, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, in 2024 Yamashita was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Videos
Publications
Dark Soil: Fictions and Mythographies
Short Story, 2024
Eight authors’ works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.
Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of Santa Cruz, the city she’s called home for nearly three decades. Her characters come alive through her signature witty humor and surreal premises, transcending the past and urging themselves into the present to illuminate a hidden geography of this California coastal city unseen in textbooks.
Alongside these stories, eight nonfiction writers chart their own counternarratives of place through the greater United States. Diverging and converging in their scale and scope, from an unnamed lot on the bank of the Ohio River to the territory of Guam, their essays use language as an instrument of excavation, uncovering layers of hurt and desire concealed in the land.
Brazil Maru
Novel, 2017
The story of a band of Japanese immigrants who arrive in Brazil in 1925 to carve a utopia out of the jungle. The dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the land they settle, and the changes demanded by a new generation all collide in this multigenerational saga.
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
Novel, 2017
A Japanese man with a ball floating six inches in front of his head, an American ceo with three arms, and a Brazilian peasant who discovers the art of healing by tickling one’s earlobe rise to the heights of wealth and fame before arriving at disasters—both personal and ecological—that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil.
Tropic of Orange
Novel, 2017
An apocalypse of race, class, and culture fanned by the media and the harsh L.A. sun.
Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip-hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it’s a symphony conducted from an overpass: grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself.
I Hotel
Novel, 2009
Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil. The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians, and activists.
Letters to Memory
Memoir, 2017
Letters to Memory is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita’s engagement with them, are a way for her to explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, orientalism, and community.
Anime Wong
Short Story, 2014
Anime Wong is a memory book of performances, most of which were produced collaboratively, reflecting questions of gender, identity, Orientalism, and racial politics. Yamashita’s theatrical work is fiction interpreted by the body in real time; these kinetic encounters, complete with giant foam-rubber sushi and cyborg kung fu fighters, create a space for humor, interaction, and epiphany.
Circle K Cycles
Short Story, 2001
“At once a short story collection, memoir and scrapbook—charmingly enlivened with snapshots, advertisements, signs, random factoids and graphics. Yamashita brings it all together with humor and heart.” —Publishers Weekly
When second-generation Japanese Brazilians emigrate to Japan to assume the manual work its citizens no longer want, their need for cultural belonging, along with their homesickness for the food, culture, and language they left behind is exacerbated by Japan’s reverence for all things “purely Japanese.” This stunning book of hybrids merges fiction, essay, and pop culture collage to illustrate a global society that resists heritage-by-hyphenation and opens the door onto important issues of the new century; labor, nationalism, and cultural assimilation. In the short stories, we meet Miss Hamamatsu ’96—a Euro-Asian beauty who covets the Miss Nikkei pageant crown, conwoman Marie Madalena and her ad scams and phone sex business, Zé Marias as he is embroiled in a debacle with a sinister employment agency, and other unique characters who are somehow enmeshed in a Japanese Brazilian employment scam and its unsolved, deadly outcome. Interspersed within these tales are Yamashita’s personal essays that detail the Asian American author’s travels to Japan with her Brazilian husband and family—a time spent straddling the fence between boisterous Brazilian customs and the conservative Japanese tradition.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• The Great American Novels – The Atlantic
• 250 outstanding individuals have been elected to the Academy in 2024 – Academy of Arts & Sciences
• Some of the Most Influential Asian American Literature of All Time – Bookriot
• Review: Sansei and Sensibility by Karen Tei Yamashita –The Los Angeles Review
• Homage as Provocation: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility – The Rumpus
• Writing Is a Ritual: A Conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita – LA Review of Books
• 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters – NBF
• Author Karen Tei Yamashita wins lifetime literary achievement award – NBC News
• Why Everyone Should Read the Great Karen Tei Yamashita – LitHub
• Recuperating History: An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita – Fiction Writers Review
• Magical Realism Transforms Los Angeles in Tropic of Orange – Chicago Review
• A Bunch of Paper Boxes Is Not a Novel: A Conversation – Air/Light
Listen to Audio
• What Counts as Environmental Storytelling: A Conversation with Karen Tei Yamashita – Edge Effects
