AAPI month, held every May, is a time to honor the contributions Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have made to our history, society, and culture. Civitella celebrates our AAPI Fellows and spotlights Japanese-American writer Asako Serizawa (CRF 2022).
Serizawa’s debut novel Inheritors won the 2021 PEN/Open Book Award and The Story Prize Spotlight Award. It was a Massachusetts Book Awards Honors Book and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. A graduate of Tufts University, Brown University, and Emerson College, Serizawa has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Inheritors has been translated into Spanish and a Korean translation is forthcoming. During her time at Civitella in 2022, she worked on a quartet of fiction about Japanese imperialism, World War II, and their larger historical context. You can hear an excerpt of her work Train to Harbin, which appeared in 2016 in the Hudson Review, on her page on our website. Click here the whole story.