Multiculti Anthology Release this Friday!

I was recently asked to blurb The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, a new anthology that's already racking up awards and sales records. One of my previous VONA students is in it, and the Introduction is by VONA faculty member David Mura. A great teaching tool!

The launch party is this Friday (May 4) in San Francisco at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Avenue, at 7 PM.  The book’s release arrives just in time for the annual World Day for Cultural Diversity Dialogue and Development on May 21st, as proclaimed by the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Editor Tara L. Masih will open the program, and authors will sign books after the reading. Refreshments will be served. 

The Chalk Circle has already garnered several accolades:

Featured title, NewPages’ “New & Noteworthy Books” list

Winner, 2012 Skipping Stones Honor Award in the Multicultural/International category

Featured title, Amazon’s “Hot New Releases” list

Tara L. Masih has assembled a stunning collection. Disregard the textbook-sounding title and gaze upon the mosaic-like cover. The range of cultural diversity and personal complexity packed into this slim, beautiful volume is staggering and far outstrips any other collection out there. These now-American writers and travelers experience the intercultural encounter at home, overseas, within their own communities, families, and selves. The voices range from adult journalists and Peace Corps volunteers to the children of Nazis and refugees. For some, like Third Culture Kids and the children of survivors, their histories and true identities are hidden, and it is through engaging with food and spirituality, photographs and music, family stories and private letters, global and personal history, that they are able to recover and share the nuances of life on our globalizing planet. Each story is a polished, multi-faceted gem of unprecedented color and clarity, which together form a glittering necklace that redefines what it is to be intercultural—that is, human—in the world today. This is a book I will be teaching and recommending to friends and strangers again and again.

--Faith Adiele, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology; Meeting Faith: The Thai Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

"A Lot Like You" film is a lot like me

Talk about a coincidink! This documentary film by a Seattle-based woman with a Tanzanian father and Korean mother was playing at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival last week. So I loaded up about 10 Africans and their friends and checked it out. They kept leaning over and telling me, “This ‘A Lot Like You’ is a lot like you!” Indeed, with filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro‘s situating of her parents within African independence movements, it felt like a longer a version of My Journey Home. Perhaps even some of the same B&W Civil Rights footage appears.

But hers has an added surprise twist of domestic abuse. I was gratified that the African men in our group thought the film was fantastic. And they also noted that her parents were together – still – and make a lovely presence on screen. I’ve never seen my parents together. My favorite artistic bit happens around 0:26-0:28, where the filmmaker’s further mixed daughter staggers out of the grandparents’ traditional thatched hut, into a sunlight doorway, and disappears.

Afterwards, I introduced myself to Kimaro and told her my hope – that we could be a double feature at the Mixed Roots Fest this summer in Los Angeles. Wouldn’t that be cool?!

http://vimeo.com/alotlikeyoumovie/trailer

Filmmaker Eliaichi Kimaro and her Tanzanian father and Korean mother

My Life in Sugar: The Bûche de Noël of Peace

	Buche de Noel 2010 A set by meetingfaith » You can also view all 15 items as a slideshow How your Bûche de Noël can help achieve world peace: First assemble all your friends (Bailey's Irish Cream Liqueur, heavy cream, bittersweet Scharfenburger chocolate, Dutch cocoa) to make a giant Ho-Ho. Decorate said Ho-Ho with marzipan mushrooms (dotted with cocoa "dirt"), coconut "snow", fresh currants, and boughs of snowy (i.e., sugared) rosemary. Fun! En route to Christmas Eve dinner, have a meltdown at the prospect that folks might actually consume your masterpiece. After a few vodkas, walk into the kitchen to find the Arab, African-American, Nordic, Nigerian & Check-Other dinner guests bowing down before your creation in unified, cross-cultural genuflection. Flushed with the possibility of interfaith tolerance and understanding (or with vodka), consent to the knife. Be less ambitious at the Nigerian Christmas party the next day. Bake a mantelikakku (Finnish almond cake) and fill with lingonberry preserves. Place said kakku next to giant, African-village-sized vats of Jollof Rice & Fried Plantain, Egusi Soup & Pounded Yam, Turkey & Salad. Watch how they get along. Your entire cultural heritage on a table.