The Poet and the Silk Girl with author Satsuki Ina and NPR's Here and Now host Deepa Fernandes

Join author Satsuki Ina in conversation with NPR's Here and Now host Deepa Fernandes on Ina's latest book, The Poet and the Silk Girl, a compelling and prismatic love story of one family’s defiance in the face of injustice—and how their story echoes across generations.

In 1942 newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married life when the United States government upended their world. They were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated in wartime American concentration camps solely on account of their Japanese ancestry. When the Inas, under duress, renounced their American citizenship, the War Department branded them enemy aliens and scattered their family across the U.S. interior. Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment, psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina weaves their story together in this moving mosaic. 

The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family’s saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.

I could not put this book down; The Poet and the Silk Girl is storytelling as activism at its finest…Satsuki Ina’s voice is a clarion reminder that the political is still personal, the personal still political, and we repeat these crimes at our own peril. Brava!Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir 

About the Speakers

Satsuki Ina is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma and author of The Poet and the Silk Girl. She helps victims of oppression to claim not only their voice but also their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism has included cofounding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina has produced two documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now! and the documentary And Then They Came for Us. A professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Deepa Fernandes is a bilingual journalist who has covered guerrilla insurgencies, natural disasters and political coups in countries from Haiti to East Timor to the United States. She covers women’s and children’s issues, education, immigration, poverty and indigenous issues. She is co-host of NPR's Here and Now and previously served as an immigration correspondent and senior newsroom advisor on race and equity at the San Francisco Chronicle. Deepa was named “Radio Journalist of the Year” three years in a row by the LA Press Club — 2016, 2017 and 2018. She won an LA Area Emmy in 2018, and has won dozens of awards over the course of her career.