UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Pennsylvania-based writer Kimi Cunningham Grant will read selections from her recently published memoir as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 7, in Foster Auditorium.
In "Silver Like Dust" (Pegasus, 2012), Grant's first published memoir, reconstructs the experience of a World War II internment camp through the memories and evasions of Obaachan, the narrator's tight-lipped but charming Japanese-American grandmother, who spent years of her young womanhood confined to camps in Sonoma, Calif., and Heart Mountain, Wyo.
Kirkus Reviews called it a “well-written book about life in a Japanese internment camp and the social and political forces that allowed their existence” and praised Grant's eloquent take on a compelling tale.
Grant, who also works as a poet, has published work in RATTLE, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, Apalachee Review, Whitefish Review and Eighteenth-Century Women. The recipient of a 2009 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in creative nonfiction, Grant won the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Poetry in 2009 and 2010; she was a finalist for the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. Grant studied at Bucknell, Messiah College and Oxford University, and currently lives with her family in the woods in central Pennsylvania.
The Mary E. Rolling Series is sponsored by Penn State's English Department, the College of Liberal Arts and the Joseph L. Grucci Fund.