Off the Rack: A Conversation with Kyoko Mori & Mako Yoshikawa

Join award-winning writers and professors of writing, Kyoko Mori & Mako Yoshikawa for the launch of their forthcoming memoirs. 

Kyoko Mori’s award-winning novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, was hailed by The New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.” Her many critically acclaimed books include Yarn, Polite Lies, The Dream of Water (nonfiction) and Stone Field True Arrow and One Bird (fiction). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The American Scholar, the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Best American Essays, among others.

She has taught at Harvard University and Goucher College and is currently on the faculty of George Mason and Lesley Universities.

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. Her novels have been translated into six languages; awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant and a Radcliffe Fellowship. As a literary critic, she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race in 20th-century American fiction. After her father’s death in 2010, she began writing essays which have appeared in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Story, LitHub, Best American Essays, Longreads, and elsewhere. 

She is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in Emerson's Masters of Fine Arts program  and she  regularly teaches Comedic Lit to undergraduates in Emerson’s Comedic Arts program. She also teaches in the Emerson Prison Initiative, a degree-granting program that is based in MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison for men.