Brandon Shimoda One of Eight Recipients of Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grants

The Whiting Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant! The grant comes with a purse of $40,000 and is awarded "to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction." Poet and writer Brandon Shimoda is among the eight grantees, selected for his forthcoming book, Japanese American Historical Plaza (City Lights). More:

The project:

Japanese American Historical Plaza is a book of creative nonfiction inhabiting the ongoing afterlife of the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. It is a memoiristic travelogue through the ruins of the incarceration sites; memorials and museums; representations of incarceration in popular culture (art, literature, film); present-day legislation; and the lives and stories of former incarcerees and their descendants.

Read an excerpt from the book, and watch a video of Shimoda responding to the news—"I feel like this is a book that I've been dreaming about since I was young"—here.