2012 Mixed Roots Film & Literary Fest this weekend!

This weekend I will be appearing with my people at the 2012 Mixed Roots Film & Literary Fest in L.A.!

Look for me on Sunday 12:30 – 1:30 PM. The readings will be held in the Tateuchi Democracy Forum at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), 369 East 1st Street, in downtown Los Angeles

Be there, or be mono-ethnic!

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

Submit to Colors of Nature Teaching Guide

The editors of the groundbreaking anthology on people of color and nature, The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2011), are looking for contributions for a higher education online teaching guide with lesson ideas, questions, prompts, and resources that teachers of literature, environmental studies, multicultural studies, American Studies, geography, and other pertinent fields would find valuable for teaching the book.

The provocative writings in The Colors of Nature exist at the intersection of cultural identity and ecological awareness, featuring work from more than 30 contributors of widely diverse backgrounds—including Jamaica Kincaid, Joseph Bruchac, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kimiko Hahn, Nikky Finney, bell hooks, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Francisco X. Alarcón and me, Faith.  This anthology explores the relationships between culture, place, “race,” and identity, which historically have been overlooked in traditional environmental writing.

Timetable and Submission Guidelines: Please let us know of your interest as soon as possible.  The deadline has been extended for receipt of lessons or class ideas, plus resources, to May 30, 2012.  Read the call for more detail on the next page of this blog.

Lauret Savoy lsavoy @ mtholyoke . edu Alison Deming  aldeming @ aol . com

"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

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out Anthology

I will be the Special Guest Host for the Bay Area Launch of "Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out" Anthology

Friday, March 11 · 7:30pm - 10:00pm
Location	UC Berkeley - Multicultural Community Center 200 MLK Jr. Student Union (formerly Heller Lounge) - Northwest corner of Telegraph & Bancroft Berkeley, CA Authors Reading March 11th: Mica Valdez Kirya Traber Amy Pimentel Angela Dosalmas Lisa Marie Rollins Rage Hezekiah Pheonix Rising Artist Showing: Margo Rivera-Weiss Musical Guest: TBA There will be copies of the book for purchase on site!! This event is co sponsored by: Inanna Publications Macha Femme Third Root Art Collective WCRC Hueso Productions QWOCMAP MultiCultural Center at UCB and more coming soon! OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT is an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. Praise for OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT: In a fresh approach to the quest for understanding mixed-race identity in the Americas, the multiple genres that find their way into the Other Tongues anthology -- from poetry to photography, fiction to scholarship -- perfectly mirror the prodigious spectrum of their authors’ positions toward the topic. This collection speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by "we" I mean not only women of mixed-race ancestry, but all citizens of 21st-century North America. -- Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity These exciting, beautifully inked narratives tell us that, as each woman embraces her biracial or multiracial identity, she mothers a new world, one with equal space for everyone. -- George Elliott Clarke, Africadian & Eastern Woodland Metis, Laureate, 2001 Governor-General’s Award for Poetry Passionate, courageous and insightful, Other Tongues speaks affectingly about the pleasures and paradoxes of living between the conventional categories of race. It is a significant anthology, one that I've been waiting for. -- Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor, Black Canadian Literature and Diaspora Studies, University of Toronto

Though I'm African and I'm American, I'm not African American

Here's Mukoma Wa Ngugi's clear-eyed op-ed on Africans in America that appeared in The Guardian 2 weeks ago. It's sort of a primer to one of the issues my new memoir will cover - Africans in America used as a buffer between African Americans and Anglo Americans. (You may remember that I introduce myself in the PBS film, My Journey Home, with the provocative statement, "Though I'm African and I'm American, I'm not African American.")

Africans who live in America do not share the history of struggle for civil rights, and indeed, even today, do not experience racism in the same way – the 'African foreigner privilege', Mukoma W Ngugi calls it. Photograph: Corbis

I love his term, "African foreigner privilege." I remember a Nigerian boyfriend, who generally was pretty boorish, telling me in a rare moment of insight that, "If you let them, white Americans will keep telling you that you're special. And if you're a naive African, you'll keep believing them."