David Mas Masumoto discusses SECRET HARVESTS on KALW’s Your Call!

On this edition of Your Call, David “Mas” Masumoto discusses his new memoir, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm.

It tells the story of his aunt Shizuko, who was disabled and taken as a “ward of the state” in 1942, just before the rest of Masumoto’s family members were forced into WWII concentration camps. For 70 years, the family believed Shizuko was dead, until one day Masumoto received a call. She was alive — and living just a few miles away from their family farm.

In Secret Harvests, Masumoto attempts to reconstruct his aunt’s life and pierce the veil of silence surrounding her disability and survival, as well as his family’s incarceration in the Gila River Relocation Center in the Arizona desert, south of Phoenix.

Guest:

David “Mas” Masumoto, organic peach and grape farmer and author of twelve books, including Epitaph for a Peach: For Seasons on a Family Farm.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram was named a 2024 Poetry Grantee by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is a poet and artist who explores innovative and experimental writing techniques. Her writing incorporates computation and artificial intelligence alongside more conventional literary forms, with her interdisciplinary work often investigating the intersections of race, gender, and coming of age in late capitalism. 

Click here to read more.

Poets and Writers interviews Francisco Aragón of Letras Latinas

In 2004, Francisco Aragón launched Letras Latinas under the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame. As the institute’s literary arm, Letras Latinas has a mission to “enhance the visibility, appreciation, and study of Latinx literature” at Notre Dame and beyond. The organization pioneered the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a first-book award for a Latinx author; a collaboration with Red Hen Press to publish books by Latinx writers; and Curated Conversations, recorded interviews with Latinx poets. Aragón recently reflected on his work and what’s next for Letras Latinas.

Read more here.

Swordfights & Spaceflights features excerpt from Thea Prieto’s novella, FROM THE CAVES!

Chapter One

Sky hears no talking when Green leaves the sea cliffs. All he hears is the fog net snapping in the offshore wind, the whine of the plastic fabric as it tears from its poles and unravels across the glass-littered beach. It is only with his arms jumped into the whirl, fingers clawing at the airborne net, that Sky notices a fleck of movement high on the distant bluffs—a falling dot. It sprouts legs as it slices the dark cliff face, knees skimming the sheer rock, two feet diving toward tide pools heaped with boulders jutting. The shredded net tugs loose from Sky’s grip as the dot silently grows into Green, and Sky wants to grab, wants to speak, but all he can think is I am seeing this, No—but I am seeing this happen.

A palm slaps red to Sky’s face.

Pay attention, yells Mark as he stomps the netting flat, into a ground alive with stinging sand. Further down the beach Tie kneels on the uncoiled fabric, her kinked fingers humming the threads back together, and Tie and Mark have their heads low, they are still working—what do I do? They didn’t see it happen, what do I tell them?

William Archila, author of THE GRAVEDIGGER’S ARCHAEOLOGY, wins the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry!

Fresno State’s Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing announced Southern California author William Archila won the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry book contest, which includes a $2,000 award and publication of his poetry collection, “S is For.”

The creative writing program sponsors the national prize, which honors Levine, the late poet and Fresno State professor emeritus of English. Levine won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and he was the 2011 poet laureate of the United States.

Archila’s book will be the first to be published as part of the Levine Prize’s new partnership with Black Lawrence Press. A New York-based publisher of contemporary poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, Black Lawrence Press was founded in 2004 and has been an independent company since 2014.

Levine Prize final judge Douglas Kearney — a widely published poet, essayist, opera composer and McKnight Presidential Fellow — chose Archila’s manuscript as the winner. There were 736 submissions. Kearney wrote of the winning entry:

“Searing — not merely how I’d describe William Archila’s gaze at the desperation and depredation attendant in power’s abuse, the violence dogging the migrant, the slayings of those who stay. No, also, searing in the sense of that which burns a mark into a surface, how the poet’s prosody scorches language into the line, into the throat, into the air. Heat, here, that makes light, signal visible even from exile, even to a distracted North who may not/may only notice that ‘Yesterday a cutthroat carved a copper / who carved a cutthroat, 224 wounds / for the smallest of spoils.’ Archila tallies these wounds and those that set fire to the heart. Here, S is for searing, for song, for sorrow. S is for sunlit, for shot, for shattered. S is for sublime. Stunning. Staggering.”

Pioneer Press recommends adding Cheri Johnson’s ANNIKA ROSE to your spring and summer reading list!

Back in the day, books by popular authors were published in fall/winter. Not anymore, as proved by these forthcoming titles for spring and summer. We’ve got John Sandford, Leif Enger, William Kent Krueger, Jess Lourey, Laura Childs, Kao Kalia Yang, Gretchen Anthony, Marcie Rendon and more. Time to cull that stack of 2023 books and decide whether to plunge right into the new season.

Bioneers shares an excerpt from David Mas Masumoto’s SECRET HARVESTS!

The Call—I Thought I Knew My Family

February 2012

Shizuko is sick, sick to death with this long agony. She lays still, her ninety year-old body motionless. Her wheelchair sits empty. A head pokes in, checking. Waiting for her to die? Or do they look because they care? A roommate whines in the next bed, but Shizuko should be the one requesting help. Now a stroke. Senses leave her body. Rest. The sentence complete. Sleep. Alone again, naturally.

Shizuko was assigned to hospice after spending thirteen years in Golden Cross Nursing Home. Before, she was housed at various state-run institutions, the type you’d see in movies with hundreds of forlorn bodies wandering long, dingy white hallways and rows and rows of beds. For decades, she roamed these halls ceaselessly. She outlived all her roommates.

Her family came as immigrants, picked peaches and grapes in the fields of California, found poverty and racism and yet stayed while struggling to build something. Shizuko avoided the Japanese American internment camps of World War II because she was classified as “retarded,” a derogatory term unfortunately commonly used in the past. Her life was branded with confusion.

A tiny woman, a little over four feet tall and weighing only seventy pounds, she was in constant motion, always relentlessly moving, seemingly endlessly active. Even when limited to a wheelchair, she could be left alone, content to shuffle throughout the structures, paddling the floor with her brightly colored, tiny, kid’s tennis shoes. A life of pain, illness, separation, departure, and return. Like a ghost, perpetually searching for stolen time.

A phone message from the Wildrose Funeral Home. A solicitation call? I dislike and distrust the phone—I farm, work with dirt, orchards and vineyards stretching along the horizon. I talk more to peaches than people because the trees pretend to listen. I find comfort and order in vine rows: their history I understand and accept.

David Mas Masumoto, author of SECRET HARVESTS, discusses his search for the perfect peach on Milk Street Radio!

Alice Waters thinks David Mas Masumoto’s peaches could change the world. Today, Masumoto shares his search for the perfect peach and the shocking family secret that changed the history of his farm. Plus, we chat with Nichole Accettola about Scandinavian baking, from cinnamon knots to rye bread, and we learn the language of strawberries.

The Hopkins Review features conversation with Afaa M. Weaver, author of A FIRE IN THE HILLS!

In early January the American Academy of Poets elected Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, and Jericho Brown to its Board of Chancellors. I was thrilled by the news, because these poets are patriotic literary citizens who belong to the world and relate to it with a gentle, transcultural consciousness. I was additionally happy for Weaver because of his longtime commitment to The Hopkins Review, where I am a contributing author. Weaver, who retired from Simmons University, where he held the Alumnae Endowed Chair for twenty years, has published several collections of poetry including A Fire in the Hills (2023), Spirit Boxing (2017), City of Eternal Spring (2014), and The Government of Nature (2013), which won him the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In a career spanning five decades of active writing and publishing, Weaver has received four Pushcart prizes, as well as numerous fellowships and awards, including a 1995 fellowship from the Pennsylvania State Arts Council, a 1998 Pew Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholar appointment to Taiwan, where he taught at the National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2023, the Academy of American Poets awarded him the Wallace Stevens Award. His papers are kept in the Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, and his portrait by Rachael Eliza Griffiths is installed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Weaver is currently a member of the MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

We do not usually expect a life as troubled as Weaver’s and a history as cruel as that of the 1950s and ’60s Baltimore from which he emerged to offer calm to a future witness like me. But Weaver spoke with vision and care, taking on the paradox of American civilization with unsparing honesty. In this conversation, Weaver and I talk about the internal dialogue of his life and work. 

DEBUT AUTHOR ALIAH WRIGHT! Reviewed in firstCLUE alongside Reviews of Crime Fiction by Elise Bryant, Sarah Easter Collins, Anthony Horowitz, and Kimberly McCreight

Check out Henrietta Thornton’s review of NOW YOU OWE ME by debut Red Hen Press author ALIAH WRIGHT published in firstCLUE! “Readers are drawn into a gripping tale—I read it in almost one go—of macabre dichotomies, with characters feeling “weird, contemptuous bliss” and “revulsion and wonder” while the lookalikes with opposite wants and needs create a trail of destruction that leads to a startling twist. While questions are answered, the ending leaves an opening for more to the story, and happily, this stellar debut is the first in a series. Read the full review here.

Cheri Johnson author of ANNIKA ROSE featured in Four Minutes Five Questions!

“A few years ago, my niece gave me a rock that says ‘you rock’ on it. I put it on my desk because I thought it was cute, but I had no idea how many times I would glance over at it for encouragement whenever I felt overwhelmed with work or was worried I wasn’t getting something right…” 

“[ ]” by William Archila, author of THE GRAVEDIGGER’S ARCHAEOLOGY, featured in Winter 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review!

The Winter 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review includes an essay by Carrie Cogan, the winner of the 2023 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest, selected by Leslie Jamison; work by the 2021 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellows, Allison AlbinoEmily Stoddard, and Jane Walton; poetry by Sara Abou Rashed, Sarah Ghazal Ali, David Joez Villaverde, and Kim Garcia; fiction by K-Ming ChangMelissa Yancy, and Brian Ma; nonfiction by Oz Johnson and Sarah Minor; and much more. The cover art is by DARNstudio, which consists of Ron Norsworthy and David Anthone.

Poetry Foundation features Diane Thiel’s “Listening in Deep Space,” from QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE!

Diane Thiel’s “Listening in Deep Space,” from QUESTIONS FROM OUTER SPACE, added to Poetry Out Loud!

Diane Thiel has lived in Europe and South America and is fluent in several languages. A 2001 Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers awards, Thiel holds BA and MFA degrees from Brown University. She has taught creative writing, literature and other subjects at the University of Miami, Florida International University, University of New Mexico, and elsewhere. Many of the poems in Echolocations, Thiel’s first collection, speak frankly about her German heritage and the lineage of trauma brought on by war and violence. Several relate to her parents’ experience of mingling cultures and languages, or to their early lives. See More By This Poet

Best of 2023: Our Favorite Indie Books

Combing through our Best of Indie list is always an interesting end-of-year exercise. Which trend percolated through our sample size of 100 books in 2023? Stewardship, a call for protection of all of Earth’s flora and fauna. Whether that means encouraging action, managing limited resources, or exposing potential harm, the books that captured Indie reviewers’ and editors’ attention this year focused on repairing the world.

Click here to read more.