The East Side Freedom Library, the Twin Cities Japanese American Citizens League, and Tsuru for Solidarity MN invite you to a panel discussion, Nikkei with Disabilities featuring Selena Moon, Atsuko Kuwana, Chuck Aoki, and Karen Tani.

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

Selena Moon is a Japanese American historian and writer who researches and writes about Japanese American mixed race and disability history. She is writing a middle grade and picture book about disabled Japanese American children in the World War II incarceration camps, which began during her Loft Literary Center Mirrors and Windows fellowship in 2020. She received her BA from Smith College and MA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Through her work with the Free-Thinking Abolitionists Interpreting Racism (FAIR) Collective, which is creating a traveling exhibit to teach children about racism, the Disabled Academic Collective (DAC), and several committees, she is working to make the world a just, safe place for all.

Atsuko Kuwana lives in Honolulu, Hawaii and was born in Fukushima, Japan. Atsuko’s disability is a spinal cord injury since birth, and she uses a wheelchair. When Atsuko was working as an intern at the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley in the early 80s, she learned that it is important for people with disabilities to live independently and change society. Atsuko is currently working as a Japanese language teacher and a translator.

Chuck Aoki is originally from Minneapolis, MN and has used a wheelchair since the age of ten due to a rare genetic condition. Chuck is a three-time US Paralympic medalist in the sport of wheelchair rugby and has been involved in adapted sports for his entire life. Currently, Chuck works as a Community Access Navigator at the University of Michigan, where he oversees their “Prescription to Play” grant program intended to increase access to sports and fitness opportunities for people living with SCIs.

Karen Tani is the Seaman Family University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds appointments in the law school and the department of history. She is the author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935-1972, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. She is currently working on a book on disability law and policy in the late twentieth century.

Free and open to all