Mira Shimabukuro

Mira Shimabukuro is lecturer in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at University of Washington, Bothell, where she teaches courses on the politics of language, literacy, and writing. Her creative work has been published in such journals as CALYX, Bamboo Ridge Quarterly, and Raven Chronicles, while her scholarship can be found in College English and Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric.

Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration

I didn’t grow up being called a Jap. Little hapa haole girl who could pass for Latina or Native, I grew up during the 1970s in a place now called Portlandia, alternating my time between the pre-gentrified working-class African American neighborhoods of what’s now “Alberta Arts District” and the all-White working-class neighborhood known then, among some, as “Felony Flats.”