Shizue Seigel

Shizue Seigel is a Sansei writer and visual artist based in San Francisco. Her family was displaced by incarceration from Pismo Beach and Stockton, California, and she grew up an Army brat in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California skid rows and sharecropping camps. She is a Jefferson Award winner, three-time San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grant recipient, and a VONA/Voices fellow. Her seven books include In Good Conscience: Supporting Japanese Americans during the Internment, My First Hundred Years: The Memoirs of Nellie Nakamura, and four anthologies of Bay Area writers and artists of color. Her prose and poetry have been published in We’ve Been Too Patient, All the Women in My Family Sing, Your Golden Sun Still Shines, InvAsian, Cheers to Muses, Empty Shoes, Away Journal, Eleven Eleven, Persimmon Tree, Lunchbox Moments, and elsewhere.

Updated May 2022

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Nikkei a Descoberto: uma coluna de poesia

Baachan

Por Shizue Seigel, traci kato-kiriyama
19 Mai 2022

This month, we are happy to present two poems from San Francisco-based writer and visual artist, Shizue Siegel. As the founder/director of Write Now!, Shizue amplifies many voices throughout the Bay Area, and here we are honored to share her voice with pieces about her Baachan. Through this writing, we are treated to her history and endeared cultural context, the many layers of compassion from and for a grandmother, the images of Shizue's childhood and the resilience of her Baachan's love and strength...enjoy. —traci kato-kiriyama * * * * * Shizue Seigel is a Sansei writer an…

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The Sansei Perspective

Por Shizue Seigel
21 Jun 2012

The Japanese American experience has rarely been examined through a Sansei lens. Art by first-generation Issei and second-generation Nisei who were among the 120,000 incarcerated in American concentration camps during World War II has been well-documented, as has the heavily assimilated and media-centric landscape of younger API artists. But the third-generation Sansei have remained a shadow or sandwich generation subsumed between survivor guilt and filial piety on the one hand and kodomo no tame ni (sacrifice for our children) on the other. The Issei identity was defined by immigration, the…

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Nikkei Heritage

Intermarriages and Hapas: An Overview - Part 2

Por George Kitahara Kich, Rebecca Chiyoko King, Larry Hajime Shinagawa, Shizue Seigel
12 Mai 2007

>> Part 1 Current Japanese American AttitudesIntermarriage has been a major, and controversial, topic of discussion within the Japanese American community over the years. The Pacific Citizen has consistently afforded a forum for some of this discussion (particularly the Holiday Issue, December 20-27, 1985). As more and more marriages across culture and race occurred, unresolved questions, opinions and prejudices surfaced. For many years, people who were of mixed race were seen as a loss to the community. Some people went so far as to state that intermarriage was worse than internment as…

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Nikkei Heritage

Intermarriages and Hapas: An Overview - Part 1

Por George Kitahara Kich, Rebecca Chiyoko King, Larry Hajime Shinagawa, Shizue Seigel
11 Mai 2007

To be biracial and Japanese American means having many different labels from which to choose. For this historical overview, we will use “Hapa”, a term popularized by the Hapa Issues Forum, to mean people who have an Asian/Asian Pacific Islander parent and a parent of any other race. Our focus here is on those with a Japanese or a Japanese American parent. There is no single Hapa experience. Over the decades, Hapas have had widely different experiences based on individual circumstance and background, as well as the time period and environment into which they were born. The history…

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