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Sunday, April 23 • 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Celebrating the Japanese American Experience with Betsy Aoki and Elaine Cockrell

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Come meet writers Elaine Cockrell and Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki whose work illuminates and celebrates the Japanese American experience. Betsy is a poet, fiction writer, and game designer whose award-winning first collection Breakpoint combines lyrical free verse with found “code poems” to explore the technological and societal landscape. Betsy infuses both her Japanese heritage and her love for tech into her poetry which takes readers on a powerful journey through Japanese folklore, family stories, and internment camps using modern and magical imagery. Through exhaustive research and her own family stories, Elaine Cockrell’s historical novel A Shrug of the Shoulders paints a vivid picture of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Through multiple points of view and dozens of vivid settings, author Elaine Cockrell creates a mosaic of Japanese-American perseverance: one tiled with humor, frustration, despair, anger, and love. We are thrilled to present this cross-genre event in collaboration with the JACL and we thank them for their sponsorship.

To attend this event, you must purchase a Book Fair & Events Pass which covers entry into our two-day Book Fair and all 17 events taking place at the Montvale Event Center. Tickets will go on sale Monday, March 20th at 8am. 


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Authors
avatar for Betsy Aoki

Betsy Aoki

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, fiction writer and game producer. Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist  and published in March 2022 by Tebot Bach as the winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award.  Her poem “Slouching like a velvet rope” won the 2021 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Jericho Brown.Aoki has received fellowships from the... Read More →
avatar for Elaine Cockrell

Elaine Cockrell

Elaine Cockrell grew up amid wheat and sugar beet fields of her family's farm near Adrian, Oregon. She lived in a multi-cultural world with Basque sheepherders, Mexican itinerant fieldhands, and Japanese-American families, most of whom settled there at the end of World War II. After... Read More →


Sunday April 23, 2023 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
Montvale Event Center: Third Floor Ballroom 1019 W 1st Ave