Author Talk: We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
Co-Hosted by Misa Sugiura, author of This Time Will Be Different

Tuesday, September 1, 2020
6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. PST
Free Admission, Advance Registration Required
Connect via Zoom; Meeting ID and password to be issued upon registration

  CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Please join us for a special discussion with New York Times best-selling author Traci Chee as she discusses her new book, We Are Not Free with fellow Japanese American author Misa Sugiura, author of This Time Will Be Different. This work of historical fiction focuses on the lives of a tight-knit group of fourteen teens who have grown up together in San Francisco’s Japantown during the time of the community’s upheaval and forced removal to American concentration camps during WWII. Traci and Misa will discuss not just the book itself, but how their own families’ experiences in the camps have informed their own voices as writers.

Book description from goodreads.com:

“All around me, my friends are talking, joking, laughing. Outside is the camp, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the city, the country that hates us. 

We are not free. 

But we are not alone.”  

Fourteen teens who have grown up together in Japantown, San Francisco.

Fourteen teens who form a community and a family, as interconnected as they are conflicted.

Fourteen teens whose lives are turned upside down when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.

In a world that seems determined to hate them, these young Nisei must rally together as racism and injustice threaten to pull them apart.

  CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

We Are Not Free Pre-Order Offer

Retailer Books, Inc. is offering a special promotion for We Are Not Free bookmarks and a poster with pre-orders of the book! For more information on the promotional offer, go to Traci Chee’s website by clicking HERE.

About Author Traci Chee

Traci Chee is an author of YA fiction. An all-around word geek, she loves book arts and art books, poetry and paper crafts, though she also dabbles at bonsai gardening, egg painting, and hosting potluck game nights for family and friends. She studied literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and earned a master of arts degree from San Francisco State University. Traci grew up in a small town with more cows than people, and now feels most at home in the mountains, scaling switchbacks and happening upon hidden highland lakes. She lives in California with her fast-fast dog.

About Co-Host, Author Misa Sugiura

Misa Sugiura’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. She is the author of It’s Not Like It’s a Secret, winner of the 2017 Asian Pacific American Librarians’ Association’s Youth Literature Award, and the critically acclaimed This Time Will Be Different. Misa was born in Chicago, majored in English at Princeton University, and taught English as a second language in japan before moving to the Bay Area, where she now lives under a giant oak tree with her husband, two sons, and two cats.

This Time Will Be Different is a young adult contemporary novel about a Japanese-American teen whose family lost their flower shop to a white family in the 1940s, bought it back in the 1970s, and in 2019 is in danger of losing it to the same white family again. Misa’s own family was also in the camps (Minidoka and Tule Lake) during WWII.