Join a conversation between Emma Sapong, an award-winning Liberian American journalist and writer, and Yuichiro Onishi. The Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) is collaborating with the East Side Freedom Library (ESFL). This conversation will be posted on ESFL’s Facebook page on June 9, 2020 at 7:00pm. It will be archived on the ESFL YouTube channel as well.

We will focus on Emma Sapong’s MPR enterprise story that she published in October 2016. It is a tale of African immigrants and Hmong farmers finding each other at the Minneapolis Farmers Market. This story elicits an ethos that may help us cultivate the necessary faculty to respond to the current crisis caused by COVID-19. It amplifies, in particular, the importance of mutual aid. The story invites us to locate a wellspring for reciprocity, a certain kind of grounding in ordinary everyday lives that can be best described as Afro-Asian enchantment.

Emma Sapong and Yuichiro Onishi will explore the making of this story, how she came to it and what she observed, as well as her writerly journey in her decades-long career. To read the story, click here.

Emma Sapong is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years of experience, specializing in the coverage of communities of color, immigrant businesses and racial disparities. She is skilled in print, digital and audio journalism, and she’s held staff positions at The Sandusky Register in Ohio, The Buffalo News in New York and Minnesota Public Radio. A Liberian American, she built her career on diversity and inclusion, reporting on the marginalized and other populations traditionally overlooked by mainstream media. She has a proven track record of uncovering systemic injustices. In recent years, her investigative stories galvanized legislative changes and overhauls in Minnesota and New York. She has won local and national awards for her balanced and nuanced reporting that countered stereotypes and exposed inequities. She obtained a Bachelors of Arts in communication/print journalism from the University of Toledo. She’s currently working on an MFA in creative writing at Augsburg University, and teaching a communication course at Dakota County Technical College.

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