JANM Book Club will present “The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest” on Saturday, Feb. 7, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum’s Democracy Center, 100 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo.
Join author Satsuki Ina and acclaimed graphic novelist Adrian Tomine for a conversation about the intergenerational impact of the Japanese American World War II incarceration experience. From the deep trauma of the past to the alarming and familiar turmoil of today’s political moment, they will discuss the power of art and family to foster understanding, healing, community, and societal change using Ina’s compelling memoir as a guide.
In 1942, photojournalist Dorothea Lange captured an era-defining portrait of Shizuko Ina, concern etched across her brow, as she craned her neck waiting in line to register her family for forced removal in San Francisco. “The Poet and the Silk Girl” is the story of the unimaginable future that came next for her and her family.
In this moving memoir, Satsuki Ina — who was born to Shizuko in the Tule Lake Segregation Center — recovers the story of how her parents survived and resisted their incarceration in U.S. concentration camps. Drawing from diary entries, haiku, censored letters, government documents, and clandestine messages, in addition to Ina’s own retrospective reflection, her multi-vocal memoir is a powerful testament to the traumatic legacies of state-sanctioned race-baiting and fear-mongering, the temerity of the human spirit, and the fortifying succor of compassionate witnessing.
Newly released in paperback, “The Poet and the Silk Girl” has been expanded to include a study and discussion guide.
Tickets: $5 general, free for youth under 18 and JANM members. Info/reservations: www.janm.org/events/2026-02-07/janm-book-club-poet-and-silk-girl-satsuki-ina-and-adrian-tomine
Satsuki Ina is a psychotherapist specializing as a consultant in community trauma. She helps victims of oppression to claim their voice and their power to transform the systems that have oppressed them. Her activism includes co-founding Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites.
She produced two Emmy-award winning documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, “Children of the Camps” and “From a Silk Cocoon,” and has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME, :Democracy Now!” and the documentary “And Then They Came for Us.”
Ina recently appeared on Rachel Maddow’s “Burn Order,” which focused on the incarceration and its connection to the government’s treatment of immigrants today.
A professor emeritus at CSU Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Adrian Tomine is the author of “Shortcomings,” “Killing and Dying,” “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist,” “Summer Blonde,” and “Sleepwalk and Other Stories.” He wrote the screenplay for the feature film adaptation of “Shortcomings,” and stories from “Killing and Dying” and “Summer Blonde” were adapted into the film “Paris, 13th District.”
Since 1999, his illustrations have appeared regularly on the cover and in the pages of The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.