Literature

Tamiko Nimura of Electric Literature named Emeritus Literature Professor Karen Tei Yamashita’s book Letters To Memory in its list of acclaimed books that tell untold stories by delving deeply into family archives. “It’s difficult to describe this inventive journey through family history, wartime incarceration and resettlement, but it’s poetic, funny, and deeply intelligent,” writes Nimura.

In an Esquire books roundup, reviewer Adam Morgan said that Emeritus Literature Professor Karen Tei Yamashita deserves to be a literary household name and that he “devoured” her ambitious fifth novel, Questions 27 & 28, titled after the “so-called loyalty questionnaire” that 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to take during their internment in concentration camps.

Nathaniel Deutsch, professor of Jewish studies, was quoted in a story about Shalom Landau, a 48-year-old Hasidic rabbi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn who has become an unlikely star on Instagram and Tik Tok.

The New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu wrote an in-depth laudatory review of Emeritus Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Karen Tei Yamashita’s new book Questions 27 & 28, which “opens an inquiry into how the story of the past gets made.”

Renée Fox, Associate Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Dickens Project, and Michael Chemers, Professor of Dramatic Literature in the Department of Theater Arts, were interviewed for a feature story about The Center For Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Associate Professor of Literature Zac Zimmer reviewed the book Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist: A Critical History of Women, Patriarchy, and Mexican National Discourse, for Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Journal.

Associate Professor of Literature Professor Zac Zimmer’s new book “First Contact: Challenging The Myth Of Firstness” received a detailed and laudatory review in The Los Angeles Review Of Books.

Professor Emerita of Literature Karen Tei Yamashita was one of the judges for this year’s National Book Awards. Yamashita, who won the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Yamashita was a judge for works of translated literature.