Ruth Ozeki Profile

Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose work has been described as “emotionally engaging as it is intellectually provocative” by The Washington Post, as well as as “a lesson in redemption that reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now,” by Elle. 

Some of her most popular books and films, including the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), and A Tale for the Time Being (2013), have also garnered critically acclaimed awards and international reception by media sources. 

The daughter of a Japanese mother and a Caucasian-American father, Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. She attended Smith College and graduated with degrees in English Literature and Asian Studies.

Her book A Tale for the Time Being, in particular, is often referenced for its brilliant, almost poetic writing style, and for Ozeki’s ability to integrate her own, complex topics of interests. In this novel environmental impact, quantum mechanics, Zen Buddhism, the movement of time, as well as what it means to be in a writer-reader relationship, all appear in reference to a story of these two female fates, intertwined.

The language she wields is always both beautifully written, and easy to read and comprehend, thereby widening her available audience. In A Tale for the Time Being Ozeki writes:

“I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”

From what we can see, she utilizes with a perfect blend of narrative that lives in a world blurred between her reality and her imagination, complemented by her superb storytelling skills.

One element I always love about Ozeki’s writing is that she tends to confront darker themes, such as suicide, unemployment, and bullying, in her novels. She makes a conscientious effort to employ her writing as a means to engage with captivating philosophical questions as well as raise awareness of issues.

In her first novel, My Year of Meats, Ozeki draws on her experiences as both a Japanese and American and the racism she’s come across to present her views of the meat industry. 

Oftentimes, she also discusses her own hardships of having a transnational, mixed-race identity which I have found extremely comforting, as a Chinese American myself.

Ozeki’s latest work, The Face: A Time Code, proves to be an interesting essay as well, as it dissects the most intimate part of the human body: her face. In it, Ozeki challenges herself by gazing at her reflection for three hours while documenting her thoughts. Throughout the process, she reveals her insecurities and vulnerabilities, especially when referring to her Japanese-American features and background. 

In an interview with Electric Literature, Ozeki said that she expected it would be a practice of facing her fears. “While I thought it might yield interesting results, I fully expected it to be difficult and somewhat painful, which it was. Indeed, the most pleasurable moment was when it was over!”

Despite this deep confrontation in her works, Ozeki still does not shy away from addressing the issues and even pairing a humorous tone with them, one that not only juxtaposes the seriousness of the matter, but comes to surprise the readers and keeps us wanting more. 

“Literature is a kind of mirror,” she said. “We read it to find out about the world, but we also read to find out about ourselves, and our reactions.”

James Baldwin Profile

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive,” American novelist, advocate, poet, and essayist James Baldwin once said. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

James Baldwin is an author of several renowned written works, some of which include his essay collections The Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name as well as prominent novels such as Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room. 

Baldwin was born to a single mother in Harlem, New York, and he never knew the identity of his biological father. When he was still young, his mother married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin, with whom he had a strained relationship. The author discovered his passion for literature at an early age, but at first he followed his stepfather’s footsteps and served as a youth minister, leading religion to become a big part of his life. Baldwin spent much of his youth taking care of his seven siblings and working to support himself, but he then made a dramatic change in his life and moved to Paris on a fellowship. The shift in location ultimately allowed him to write more about his own background. 

According to a The New York Times interview, Baldwin said, “Once I found myself on the other side of the ocean, I could see where I came from very clearly, and I could see that I carried myself, which is my home, with me. You can never escape that. I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with both.”

What I appreciate about Baldwin is that, despite societal pressures, he favored incorporating fundamental social questions and moral dilemmas in his pieces. As a gay African-American man, Baldwin tended to share his thoughts on issues pertaining to institutionalized racism, and he refered to other encounters of discrimination with homosexuality in his work. Typically he draws inspiration for fictional protagonists from his personal challenges in life, as their characteristics are often distilled from his own. His essays, which have received great critical acclaim, are entirely autobiographical. In Notes of a Native Son Baldwin writes:

“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

Through writing, Baldwin also permits distinct themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class to reflect major political events and social change that took place in the United States, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. 

As a victim of discrimination himself, Baldwin became an active participant in the movements by translating Black peoples’ aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies during the times. His passion for the topic of general activism and social criticism in the country spurred the growth of his notoriety, especially throughout the mid-twentieth century. 

According to Orde Coombs in the New York Times Book Review, Baldwin’s central preoccupation as a writer lay in “his insistence on removing, layer by layer, the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country.” The author saw himself as someone who did not settle for peace, and he always unveiled the truth in spite of complacency, Coombs wrote.

In addition to the countless awards and honorable mentions Baldwin received even after his death, his perpetual influence continues to cement his legacy as a beloved and inspirational figure in history. 

I recently came across his novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, in class, and found myself overwhelmingly frustrated just through reading about his fictional, yet completely realistic, depictions of African Americans facing internal and external hardships in the New York area. Baldwin’s poetic language beautifully illustrates the pain of his characters, particularly in their presented conflict with the criminal justice system.

“But I know about suffering; if that helps,” Baldwin writes in the novel. “I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”

In light of many lives lost to systemic racism and the continual strife surrounding both George Floyd’s murder and Breanna Taylor’s death, I believe that now is the most crucial time to consider reading Baldwin’s literature. Although he is only one of many writers who can reveal the struggles presented in Black lives, Baldwin, in my opinion, uses his unparalleled written ability to perfectly encapsulate the reality of injustice that continues to preserve in today’s America. 

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually,” Baldwin once said. “You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable.”

Amanda Gorman Profile

On January 20, 2021, award-winning writer Amanda Gorman made history as the youngest ever presidential inaugural poet at 22 years of age. Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb,” features themes of hope, freedom, and justice—three key components that the nation must strive to prioritize when turning the pages of this new chapter of leadership. 

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gorman began writing when she was only a few years old. Growing up with an English teacher for a mother, her early days were brimming with a passion for language and literature, as she witnessed, first hand, their potential to empower younger generations.

However, at the same time that she was falling in love with the written and spoken word, Gorman also had to battle a lifelong struggle that threatened to impede on her ability to properly perform: her speech impediment. 

According to The Los Angeles Times, Gorman said this hindrance only piled on to the anxiety that every writer feels when sharing their works. In overcoming such an obstacle, she worked to perfect sounds most people don’t take issue with, one of which was the pronunciation of the letter “R”.  “For me, there was this other echelon of pressure, which is: Can I say that which needs to be said?”

Gorman does not regard her disability as a weakness, as it has come to shape the way she has grown in her poetry career. “I arrived at the point in my life in high school, where I said, ‘you know what? Writing my poems on the page isn’t enough for me. I have to give them breath, and life, I have to perform them as I am.’ That was the moment that I was able to grow past my speech impediment,” she said in a CBS interview.“It’s made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be.” 

At 16, Gorman was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. As time passed, she went on to study Sociology at Harvard where she was honored with the title of the National Youth Poet Laureate, the first person to hold the position. Gorman then proceeded to perform multiple commissioned poems, receive recognition from countless organizations and famed celebrities, and to speak at events and venues across the country, including the Library of Congress and Lincoln Center. 

Ultimately, though, it was her original composition, “The Hill We Climb,” which she recited at the United States Capitol for the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, that has prompted an echo of her name in households and history books. Now, Gorman joins a small group of poets including Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander and Richard Blanco, who have helped to cement past inaugurations as both momentous and symbolic moments in time.

“Our instinct is to turn to poetry when we’re looking to communicate a spirit that is larger than ourselves,” Gorman said in an interview with Michelle Obama for Time magazine. “The specific history of words in the Inaugural poem was: We have seen the ways in which language has been violated and used to dehumanize.”

In creating the poem itself, Gorman knew that she had to address all the troubling events that the country has undergone in the past couple months. From the solitude of the pandemic to the racial protests to the political violence surrounding the election, she set out to write a poem that would foster a sense of collective purpose, according to an interview with The New York Times.

“I wasn’t trying to write something in which those events were painted as an irregularity or different from an America that I know,” said Gorman. “I crafted an inaugural poem that recognizes these scars and these wounds. Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them.”

Given the momentality of the task, Gorman relied on several sources of writing for inspiration. She listened to historic soundtracks and researched previous speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for elements to incorporate into her writing. In the end, it was the January 6th riot by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol that finally spurred her to lean into the more reflective and confrontational tone of her final piece.

“I wanted it to be a message of hope and unity. And I think that Wednesday for me really just underscored how much that was needed,” she said in The New York Times article. “In my poem, I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen over the past few weeks and, dare I say, the past few years. But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal.” 

As a result, Gorman’s poem is littered with beautiful rhymes and a beating alliteration that signifies two explicit calls amidst this period of social unrest: one for celebration and another for change in the future of the country. Gorman’s demands can especially be seen in the instances within the poem where she references the attack on the Capitol.

“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,/would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy,/and this effort very nearly succeeded./But while democracy can be periodically delayed,/it can never be permanently defeated,” Gorman wrote. “For while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.”

Gorman also includes a fitting trope of “light” to begin and end her poem. This metaphor both embodies her aspirations for the future and is a recognition of past mistakes—two motifs that come to underscore the meaning conveyed throughout the entirety of the piece.

‘That is the promise to glade/the hill we climb/if only we dare it./Because being American is more than a pride we inherit./It’s the past we step into/and how we repair it,” Gorman wrote. “When day comes we step out of the shade,/aflame and unafraid./The new dawn blooms as we free it./For there is always light,/if only we’re brave enough to see it/If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

The eloquence and symbolism of her written lines is not the only reason that I continue to find myself remembering this poem weeks after that fateful day. It might have been her powerful delivery of the poem itself that caused the words to ring so deeply in my heart. 

“Poetry is a weapon. It is an instrument of social change…and poetry is one of the most political arts out there because it demands that you rupture and destabilize the language in which you’re working with,” Gorman once said. “Poetry is typically the touchstone that we go back to when we have to remind ourselves of the history that we stand on, and the future that we stand for.”

The impact of her performance was thus unparalleled, and I found myself watching her video over and over again that very day. For it was when she stood up at that podium—shining radiantly in her pale yellow coat and bright blood-colored headband, booming with a clear voice that enraptured the eager audience across the world—I swore I was in the presence of a legend. 

“You really have to crown yourself with the belief that what I’m about and what I’m here for is way beyond this moment,” Gorman said. “I’m learning that I am not lightning that strikes once. I am the hurricane that comes every single year.”

One cannot deny the boundless possibilities of a pen in Amanda Gorman’s hand.