Wednesday, February 18, 2009

What is Suzanne Kamata reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Suzanne Kamata, author of last year's debut novel, Losing Kei.

Kamata's short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications including New York Stories, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, Kyoto Journal, The Utne Reader, The Japan Times, Brain, Child, Skirt!, Ladybug, and Cicada. Her work also appears in the anthologies Yaponesia, The Beacon Best of 1999, It's a Boy, It's a Girl, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, Not What I Expected, and One Big Happy Family. She is the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press, 1997) and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising Children with Special Needs (Beacon Press, 2008).

Part of her Writers Read entry:
I was excited to read T4 by Ann Clare LeZotte last week. The title refers to the Nazi's program to "euthanize" disabled individuals, and the novel-in-verse is told from the point of view of a deaf girl who is forced to hide out. The language is spare, but the story packs a powerful punch. Like my daughter, the author Ann Clare LeZotte is profoundly deaf, which makes this story even more of an accomplishment.

Last week I also read Mother in the Middle, by Sybil Lockhart, one of my colleagues at literarymama.com. Lockhart, a neurobiologist, writes of raising small children while caring for her mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She paints a vivid portrait of her family while illuminating the changes in her children's and mother's brains.[read on]
Visit Suzanne Kamata's website and blog.

Writers Read: Suzanne Kamata.

--Marshal Zeringue