This will be a special chance for WiK members to interact with others who have a keen interest in writing. The critically acclaimed Susan Ito will be accompanied on her visit to Kyoto from northern California by students on her writing course. Susan specialises in memoir.

The following is taken from an interview by Leslie Lindsay in the Hippocampus Magazine …

“Susan is a ‘hanbun-hanbun’ (half-and-half) Japanese-Caucasian writer adopted at just several months of age by a Japanese couple in New Jersey. Her mother, in her Bronx accent, often said ‘the place you came from, where you got you ;’ Susan knew was adopted, but she didn’t know anything about her birth parents.

Susan’s work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and has been awarded residences at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the U.S. Susan lives in Northern California and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University, and Bay Path University.”