To listen to Maxine Hong Kingston, click onto the link:SEG1-2
Arts in the Valley host Kim McMillon interviews Maxine Hong Kingston, and Native American Author Kim Shuck on issues of peace, art, community, and life on Saturday, June 18th at 8 PM on 1480 KYOS AM in Merced, CA.
Born in 1940, one of eight children, Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. Her father, a scholar in China, ran a laundry business and a gambling house in California; her mother, a doctor in China, helped with the laundry and worked in the fields. Maxine won scholarships to the University of California at Berkeley, where she returned to teach as Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. But alongside her academic life, she had embarked on a career as a writer, and her extraordinary books have become key texts in the American canon. In many ways this memoir recalls her first major work “The Woman Warrior” in which she blended Chinese myth with fiction and autobiography to reflect on her mother’s past life in China and the experience of immigrants to America. In “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life”, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a fictional journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the villages of her father and mother. Beautifully written, endlessly thought-provoking, this is an important book from one of the major writers of her generation. Hong Kingston is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including, in 2008, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
To listen to the interview with Kim Shuck, click onto the link:
SAV2-14
Kim Shuck is a poet, weaver, educator doer of piles of laundry, planter of seeds, traveler and child wrangler. She was born in her mother’s hometown of San Francisco, one hill away from where she now lives. Her ancestors were and are Tsalagi, Sauk and Fox and Polish, for the most part.
Kim received a Master of Fine Arts degree in weaving in 1998 from San Francisco State University. As a poet Kim has read her work around the United States. In late summer and fall of 2005 she toured through Jordan with a group of poets from many countries in the interest of peace and communication.
Shuck is co-curator of the Spoken Word Series of the Native American Cultural Center. Kim sat for a time on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools.
To listen to the entire program, click onto the link:ARTSINVAL061811-3
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