MIRIKITANI, Janice 1942-

PERSONAL: Born February 5, 1942, in Stockton, CA; daughter of Ted and BelleAnne (Matsuda) Mirikitani; married Cecil Williams (a minister), 1982; children: Tianne (daughter). Education: University of California—Los Angeles, B.A. (cum laude), 1962; University of California—Berkeley, teaching credentials, 1963; attended San Francisco State University.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Glide Foundation, 330 Ellis St., San Francisco, CA 94102. E-mail—child_youth_ [email protected].

CAREER: Poet, activist, teacher, choreographer, writer, and editor. Contra Costa Unified School District, Contra Costa, CA, teacher, 1964-65; Glide Church, San Francisco, CA, administrative assistant, 1966-69, Glide Church/Urban Center, program director, 1969—, Glide Dance Group, choreographer and artistic director, 1973—, Glide Foundation, president, 1983—. San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, lecturer in Japanese American literature and creative writing, 1972; Asian American Dance Collective, San Francisco, guest choreographer, 1983-85; cofounder of Asian American Publications; member of Third World Communications. Affiliated with Vanguard Foundation, Asian American Media Center, Yerba Buena Cultural Board, California Poets in the Schools, Asian American Theatre Company, Zellerbach Community Arts Distribution Committee (board member), United Tenderloin Community Fund (board of directors), and Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature; Woman Warrior in Arts and Culture award, Pacific Asian American Bay Area Women's Coalition, 1983; Woman of Words award, Women's Foundation, 1985; with husband, Cecil Williams, Chancellor's Medal of Honor, University of California—San Francisco, 1988; named Woman of the Year by the California State Assembly, 1988; Outstanding Leadership award, Japanese Community Youth Council, 1990; named poet laureate of San Francisco, CA, 2000.

WRITINGS:

poetry and prose

Awake in the River (poetry and prose), Isthmus Press, 1978.

Shedding Silence: Poetry and Prose, Celestial Arts (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems, Celestial Arts (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

Love Works ("Poet Laureate" series), City Lights Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

other

(Editor) Third World Women, 1973.

(Editor, with others) Time to Greez!: Incantations from the Third World (poetry), introduction by Maya Angelou, Glide Publications (San Francisco, CA), 1975.

(Editor) Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology, Japanese American Anthology Committee (San Francisco, CA), 1980.

(With husband, Cecil Williams) Breaking Free: A Glide Songbook, Glide Word Press (San Francisco, CA), 1989.

(Editor, with husband, Cecil Williams) I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble: Children of the Tenderloin Speak Out, Glide Word Press (San Francisco, CA), 1989.

(Editor) Watch Out! We're Talking, 1993.

(With Maya Angelou and Guy Johnson) A Celebration with Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson, and Janice Mirikitani on the Occasion of Guy Johnson's Fiftieth Birthday (sound recording), Don't Quit Your Day Job Records (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

Contributor to periodicals and journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Janice Mirikitani is a third-generation Japanese American who spent her infancy in an internment camp in Arkansas. As an adult, she has spoken out against this containment, as well as against continuing racism against Asian Americans and people of color. During the 1960s Mirikitani began working at the Glide Church in San Francisco, where she met and married Cecil Williams, the church's pastor. Mirikitani advanced to become program director of the Glide Church and Urban Center, and in this capacity she oversaw programs that provided food, housing, and health care for the poor and homeless, rape and abuse recovery programs and counseling for women, and job training and counseling services for young people. She became choreographer and artistic director of the church's dance company and was eventually elected president of the Glide Foundation.

Mirikitani has served on a multitude of boards in the Bay area and has choreographed and produced dozens of socially themed dance productions. These include Who Among the Missing, in honor of Central Americans who have been tortured, imprisoned, and murdered; A Tribute to King, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Lonnie's Song, about the AIDS crisis; and Revealing Secrets, Releasing Fear, which deals with incest, addiction, and recovery. Under Mirikitani's leadership, Glide has experienced rapid growth, and in 1999, the number of volunteers who were assisting in these programs reached 35,000. Mirikitani's creative work follows a path similar to that of her community work, and she is committed to helping women artists and writers. She has collected and published women's writings in anthologies and magazines, and her own poetry and writing has been included in anthologies, journals, textbooks, and magazines.

Rowena Tomaneng wrote in Reference Guide to American Literature that in Mirikitani's first collection, Awake in the River, the poet's "experience of subjugation and racism within her own 'homeland' provided a historical context with which to view other events taking place globally. The trauma of Japanese American internment, the nuclear devastations of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia are painful experiences that have shaped Mirikitani's poetry in Awake in the River. In this first collection, Mirikitani has turned her sense of history into a weapon, an active protest against racist ideology in America. The opening poem, 'For My Father,' reveals the dominant concerns and imagery of the rest of Mirikitani's work." Mirikitani portrays her father as both the hero and the antihero of his children. He denies them the strawberries he has grown because he must sell them to earn money. "This poem is powerful in its depiction of the results of oppression," continued Tomaneng. "Mirikitani contrasts the wealthy white world to the isolated, impoverished, and oppressive world of the Japanese Americans." "Tule Lake" describes the experiences of the Japanese Americans who were interned at the most severe desert camp, and the title poem depicts the struggle for survival in the camps. "Loving from Vietnam to Zimbabwe" includes graphic descriptions of American atrocities in Vietnam.

Mirikitani is an editor of Time to Greez!: Incantations from the Third World, a collection of poems, prose, and graphic art by Third World writers and artists, with an introduction by American poet Maya Angelou. A "greeze" is a feast of food, and a Publishers Weekly contributor noted that the feast this volume presents consists of contributions that reflect "a righteous rage" or "a weary knowingness," but added that also to be found among the pages is "the joy of identity and guileless humor."

Shedding Silence: Poetry and Prose, a collection of thirty-five poems, several works of prose, and a short play, is divided into four sections. The first, "Without Tongue," contains angry poems about racial discrimination. The works of "It Isn't Easy" are personal and address Mirikitani's marriage and marriage in general. The last two sections, titled "What Matters" and "Reversals", address a variety of issues from the politics of various nations to the pollution of Love Canal. Kliatt reviewer Maureen K. Griffin called "When There Is Talk of War" and the play Shedding Silence "outstandingly beautiful. The Japanese-American experience is clearly delineated and should be required reading for young Americans."

Two of the poems are intergenerational. "Breaking Tradition" is about the poet's own daughter, who sees herself as being different from her mother, and "Breaking Silence" focuses on the poet's mother, who breaks her silence about her internment and past suffering. Shirley Geok-lin Lim wrote of Mirikitani's writing in Belles Lettres that "the theme of breaking taboos, of defying conventions and stereotypes, runs throughout her work."

Mirikitani and her husband collaborated on I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble: Children of the Tenderloin Speak Out, which contains the works of children participating in Glide's writing program. The multiracial Tenderloin district of San Francisco is notorious for it crime, prostitution, and drugs, and in the poems, prose, and drawings of this collection, children speak out about their despair, but also about their hopes and dreams for themselves and their families. Penny Kaganoff wrote in Publishers Weekly that "with a primitive urban minimalism both verbal and visual, the children bear witness to the deprivations of their world."

School Library Journal's John Philbrook felt that "although invaluable as a social document and useful in discussions of the current drug wars, there is also some excellent writing to be had here." Philbrook noted the talent of fifteen-year-old Randall Woodruff and said that nine-year-old Tianah Maji's fictional meeting of Latoya Jackson and Roger Rabbit "is deliciously funny."

Mirikitani continues her protest of racial and gender inequality, patriarchy, and oppression with the poems of We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems, many of which are disturbing, particularly those about child rape, as in "Insect Collection" and "Where Bodies Are Buried." "Many of the poems focus on the violation of the body as both an inescapably physical act of violence, and a metaphor for the silencing and erasure of the marginalized," wrote Traise Yamamoto in Amerasia Journal. "As in her previous work, Mirikitani consistently identifies silence with frustrated repression, fear, and powerlessness. Where only speech is recognized as power, the language of silence is no language at all: it does not protest but enables rape, systemic racism, and imperialist aggression."

Ann E. Reuman wrote in an American Women Writers profile, "Direct, vitally angry, and politically impassioned, Mirikitani breaks taboos, writing against expectations of her as a woman and as an Asian American to speak decorously. Without apology, diminution, self-deprecation, or conciliation, she validates her voice and places its power, its passion, and its rage in the context of large and violent truths. While some have found her writings too angry and blunt, many have felt empowered by her explosive poetry and prose and her clear political commitment. In all that she does, Mirikitani insists on the collective power of voice and vows to do her part to stop violence."

Mirikitani was named San Francisco's poet laureate in 2000. Tomaneng wrote that "it is Mirikitani's role as both artist and community representative that makes her an indispensable writer in the literary history of Asian Americans."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

American Women Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Bruchac, Joseph, editor, Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, 1983.

Fisher, Dexter, editor, The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States, 1980.

Reference Guide to American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

Yamamoto, Traise, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese-American Women, Identity, and the Body, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1999.

periodicals

Amerasia Journal, winter, 1996, Traise Yamamoto, review of We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems, pp. 155-156.

Belles Lettres, May, 1988, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, review of Shedding Silence: Poetry and Prose, p. 2.

Kliatt, January, 1988, Maureen K. Griffin, review of Shedding Silence, p. 29.

Publishers Weekly, March 10, 1975, review of Time to Greez!: Incantations from the Third World, p. 58; July 21, 1989, Penny Kaganoff, review of I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble: Children of the Tenderloin Speak Out, pp. 55, 56.

School Library Journal, December, 1989, John Philbrook, review of I Have Something to Say about This Big Trouble, p. 116.

Women's Review of Books, February, 1988, Adrian Oktenberg, review of Shedding Silence, p. 12.*