Susan Kiyo Ito, I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE

Bel Canto Books is delighted to host Bay Area author and educator Susan Kiyo Ito to celebrate her new memoir, I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE. Susan will be joined in conversation by journalist Erika Hayasaki, author of SOMEWHERE SISTERS: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family.

Kindly RSVP so we can plan accordingly. Please stay home if you feel sick.

This event will be held indoors at KUBO LB (3976 Atlantic Avenue, Long Beach CA).

E VENT SCHEDULE

3:45pm – Event check-in starts

4:00pm – Event welcome and author introductions

4:15pm – 5:00pm – Author reading/conversation and Q&A

5:00pm – 6:00pm – Book signing and shopping time

6:00pm – Event ends

ABOUT THE BOOK

A memoir of one Japanese American adoptee’s experiences with her birth mother, love, family, and identity, that not only looks at the author’s experience as a mixed-race adoptee, but at larger legacies of Japanese American experience in the United States, including the lasting traumas of World War II internment.

“Susan Kiyo Ito is like a surgeon operating on herself. She is delicate, precise, and at times cutting with her words. But it is all in service of her own healing and to encourage us all to be brave enough to do the same in our own stories.” —W. Kamau Bell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, forthcoming from the Ohio State University Press in November 2023. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University. She was a co-organizer of Rooted and Written, a writing workshop for writers of color.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California whose longform stories appear in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Atlantic, The Verge, Elle, Marie Claire, Glamour, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Foreign Policy, Slate, The New Republic, Newsweek, Time, and others. Her work has been recognized by the Association of Sunday Feature Editors, the Society for Features Journalism, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Longform’s Best of Science writing of 2016 and 2017, as well as in the Best American Science and Nature Writing book series of 2019 and 2022. She is the author of THE DEATH CLASS: A True Story About Life (Simon & Schuster), and SOMEWHERE SISTERS: A Story of Adoption, Identity and the Meaning of Family was released in October 2022 (Algonquin Books, Hachette), named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a recipient of a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting. Formerly a national writer for the Los Angeles Times, she teaches in the Literary Journalism Program.

A BOUT KUBO LB

KUBO LB is a creative community space for Filipinx, BIPOC, LGBTQ, and Women led small businesses. KUBO LB is a space to support and educate small businesses through retail, business workshops and more.

Susan Kiyo Ito, I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE