I Would Meet You Anywhere: In-Store Discussion with Susan Kiyo Ito

The Book Stall welcomes author Susan Kiyo Ito to the store on Tuesday, February 13 at 6:30 pm for a discussion featuring her new memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere. An exploration of her experiences with her birth mother, family, and identity as a Japanese American adoptee, the book also studies the larger legacies of Japanese American experience in the United States, including the lasting traumas of World War II internment. Ms. Ito will be in conversation with award-winning essayist Gayle Brandeis.

This event is free with registration. To register, please visit our website or CLICK HERE.

More About I Would Meet You Anywhere: Growing up with adoptive Nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Along the way, Ito grappled with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, “I Would Meet You Anywhere” is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.

Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, says, “If it is possible to feel all the emotions in a single book, this is it. Determined to no longer be the secret or the ‘wild inconvenience,’ Susan Ito writes with grace, courage, and wonder. I Would Meet You Anywhere is a cinematic, breathtaking journey of family, identity, and secrets: an instant classic in adoption literature.”

More About the Author: Susan Kiyo Ito is the co-editor of the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. A MacDowell Fellow, she has also been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, “The Ice Cream Gene,” around the US and adapted Untold Stories: Life, Love, and Reproduction for the theater. She writes and teaches in the Bay Area.

More About Our Conversation Partner: Gayle Brandeis is the author of Drawing/Breath: Inhales and Exhales on Body and Word, an exploration of both the writing life and the embodied life, that delves into Brandeis’ experience with long-haul Covid and its impact on her creative voice. Her other works include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write and the novels The Book of Dead Birds, which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage, Delta Girls, and My Life with the Lincolns, which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a statewide read in Wisconsin. Her most recent books also include the poetry collections The Selfless Bliss of the Body and Many Restless Concerns.