Koa Books’ Author Maxine Hong Kingston To Receive National Medal of the Arts at White House Monday Ten American artists will be presented the National Medal of the Arts by President Obama Monday July 28, 2014, during a ceremony at the White House.(To be broadcast at wh.gov/live at 3 pm EDT). The medal honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nations understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans access to important resources in the humanities. One of these awards will be presented to Maxine Hong Kingston, whose collection of writings by veterans and those affected by war and violence published by Koa Books, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, received the Northern California Book Reviewers Special Recognition Award in Publishing in 2006. The Reviewers Association called it “one of the most important books published” that year. Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace is a harvest of creative, redemptive storytelling—nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—spanning five wars and written by those most profoundly affected by war and violence. For more than twenty years, National Book Award-winning author Maxine Hong Kingston has led writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans and their families. The contributors to this volume—combat veterans, medics, and others who served in war; gang members, drug users, and victims of domestic violence; draft resisters, deserters, and peace activists—are part of this community of writers who continue to work together to heal the trauma of violence through art. Reading this collection, we witness worlds torn apart then rebuilt. It is the distilled wisdom of warriors and their loved ones expressing themselves with breathtaking artistry and truth. San Francisco Magazine called Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace “the glowing result of a brave experiment.” The Chicago Tribune described it as “powerful and finely written.” Bill Moyers said, “No one I know has done more to help veterans bear witness to unspeakable experience than Maxine Hong Kingston.” For Bill Moyers’ program about Maxine and this book, visit pbs.org/moyers/journal/05252007/profile.html Maxine Hong Kingston began writing at the age of nine (“I was in the fourth grade and all of a sudden this poem started coming out of me”). She won her first writing award—a journalism contest at UC Berkeley—when she was sixteen. In 1976 The New York Times praised her first book, The Woman Warrior, comparing it to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, saying, “It is an investigation of soul . . . Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are crises of the heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it.” At the age of thirty-six, she was a celebrity, winning the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Other books would follow, and the praise would continue to be unstinting. In 1980, she was named a Living Treasure of Hawai‘i by the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawai‘i. In 1991, following a massive fire in the Oakland-Berkeley hills that consumed Maxine’s house and the only copy of her manuscript-in-process, The Fourth Book of Peace, and as the first President Bush was ordering the invasion of Iraq, she began offering writing and meditation workshops for veterans, to help them give voice to their experiences and work toward personal peace. As she’d hoped, the writing became a process of healing and renewal not just for the veterans but also for Maxine. She drew on the experience of these workshops in The Fifth Book of Peace. In 1997, Maxine Hong Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton. In March 2003, she was arrested for crossing a police line at the White House as part of a CODEPINK action to protest the Iraq War. She retired from her career teaching literature and creative writing, mostly at UC Berkeley, where she was known for offering personalized instruction to each student, even in auditorium-sized classes, encouraging “real communication.” She and her husband, actor Earll Kingston, live in Oakland, California. Their son, Joe Kingston, is a musician in Honolulu. About Koa Books Koa Books was founded on Maui in 2005 by Arnie Kotler, cofounder of Berkeley’s Parallax Press, to publish works on personal transformation, social justice, and Hawaii’s politics and culture. Koa’s authors include Maxine Hong Kingston, Jerry Mander, Sulak Sivaraksa, Robert A. Johnson, Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright, Cindy Sheehan, and Lama Surya Das. Koa Books are distributed to the trade by SCB Distributors. Visit koabooks and vowvop.org
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 16:24:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015