World Literature Festival Recap: In Conversation with Naomi Hirahara
This April, the New York Public Library hosted our first World Literature Festival. Across three weeks, there were a wide range of programs from live storytimes, to book discussions, to author talks.
We hosted an “In Conversation” series of author talks and panels where we invited authors, poets, and leaders of organizations to speak with us. These programs were conducted in many languages and we are pleased to share the recordings now as part of Immigrant Heritage Month 2021 to continue to highlight and celebrate authors that reflect our communities.
On April 29th, the Library hosted author Naomi Hirahara for a discussion about her forthcoming novel Clark and Division. In conversation with Karen Loder and Kyoko Wells, they talked about why she set her story in World war II era Chicago; why she chose to include Japanese words without translation; and how, although her book is fiction, Ms. Hirahara’s research is thorough enough that we can see how the Japanese immigrants during WWII lived in the Chicago community.
This video has captions in English.