Edmonds CC Community Read welcomes author Jamie Ford
01/07/2013
Author Jamie Ford speaks at 12:30 p.m., Wed., Feb. 27, in the Black Box Theatre, 20000 68th Ave. W, Lynnwood, as part of this year’s 2012-13 Edmonds CC Community Read, "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" (2009). This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 425.640.1139 or go to www.blackboxedcc.org.
An award-winning short-story writer and New York Times bestselling author, Ford is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and a survivor of Orson Card’s Literary Boot Camp. Ford grew up near Seattle’s Chinatown. He is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who immigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford.”
"Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" begins in 1986 outside the Panama Hotel in Seattle, where the belongings of Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II have been discovered. The novel tells the story of first generation Chinese American Henry Lee and Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student who forge an unlikely friendship amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids of the 1940s.
A classroom discussion with Ford and Steve Sumida, a professor of Asian American literature at the University of Washington, follows the lecture at 3:45 p.m. in Snoqualmie Hall 201 on the topic of "Microaggressions, Multiculturalism, and Modern Day Racism in our Communities."
For Edmonds College students, the community read is also a scholarship opportunity. Students who read the book and submit a project inspired by it can apply for a scholarship that covers spring quarter tuition. The Edmonds College Foundation funds three Edmonds CC Community Read scholarships. The deadline to apply is 5 p.m., Wed., Jan. 16. More information on the scholarships go to, edmonds.edu/edmondsccread. The three scholarship recipients will be acknowledged at the lecture.
This is the sixth year of the Edmonds CC Community Read. Books have included: "The Big Burn" (2009) by Timothy Egan, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" (2009) by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer; "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World" (2007) by Dan Koeppel; "Middle Passage" (1998) by Charles Johnson; and "Zaatar Days, Henna Nights, Adventures, Dreams and Destinations Across the Middle East" (2007) by Maliha Masood.
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