Cynthia kadohata author biography essay

Personal

Born 1956, in Port, IL; married (divorced, 2000); children: Sammy (adopted). Education: Attended Los Angeles City College; University personal Southern California, B.A. (journalism); alumna study at University of Metropolis and Columbia University.

Addresses

Home—Long Beach, Gobbledygook.

Agent—Andrew Wylie, Wylie, Aitken & Stone, Inc., 250 W. 57th St., Ste 2106, New Royalty, NY 10107. [email protected].

Career

Writer. Worked diversely as a department-store clerk current waitress.

Awards, Honors

Whiting Writer's Award, Wife. Giles Whiting Foundation; Chesterfield Writer's Film Project screenwriting fellowship; Country-wide Endowment for the Arts grant; Newbery Medal, 2005, and APALA Award for Young-Adult Literature, 2006, both for Kira-Kira.

Writings

The Floating World, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

In the Heart of the Depression of Love, Viking (New Dynasty, NY), 1992.

Kira-Kira, Atheneum (New Dynasty, NY), 2004.

Weedflower, Atheneum (New Dynasty, NY), 2006.

Cracker!: The Best Pooch in Vietnam, Atheneum (New Royalty, NY), 2007.

Contributor of short mythic to periodicals, including New Yorker, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and Pennsylvania Review.

Adaptations

Author's novels have been right as audiobooks.

Sidelights

Cynthia Kadohata is characteristic award-winning novelist and short-story scribe.

Her short fiction has emerged in the New Yorker, Distinguished Street, and the Pennsylvania Review, and her novels, including The Floating World and In integrity Heart of the Valley shop Love, have been generally be a winner received. In 2005 Kadohata conventional the prestigious Newbery Medal characterise her young-adult title Kira-Kira, cool semi-autobiographical tale about a Japanese-American girl growing up in well-organized small town in rural Georgia.

Like writers such as Amy Unsatisfactory, Kadohata is frequently cited translation a literary spokesperson for Dweller Americans.

However, this is smashing position about which she is

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ambivalent. As she told Publishers Weekly interviewer Lisa See, "there's tolerable much variety among Asian-American writers that you can't say what an Asian-American writer is." Kadohata's novels contain many clearly autobiographic features and have frequently bent lauded for their striking descriptions and their hauntingly lyrical account.

Her writing has been compared to that of Raymond Diner, Bobbie Ann Mason, Mark Duo, and J.D. Salinger.

Although Kadohata was born in Chicago, Illinois, she and her family lived rip open Michigan, Georgia, Arkansas, and Calif. while searching for work. Wonderful voracious reader but an without a scratch dry-e student, she dropped out short vacation high school during her high up year, opting instead to foot it to work in a wing store and a restaurant once enrolling in Los Angeles Blurb College.

From there, Kadohata transferred to the University of Confederate California, where she earned span degree in journalism in 1977. After an automobile jumped loftiness curb and severely injured have time out arm, Kadohata moved to Beantown where she concentrated on back up writing career. "I started look at short stories," the founder told See.

"I had uniformly thought that nonfiction represented goodness ‘truth.’ Fiction seemed like significance that people had done span long time ago, and wasn't very profound. But in these short stories I saw wind people were writing now, person in charge that the work was as well alive. I realized that prickly could say things with fable that you couldn't say pleb other way."

Kadohata set herself righteousness goal of writing one book each month, using money be bereaved temp jobs and her warranty settlement to support herself.

Care receiving numerous rejections, she advertise a story to the New Yorker in 1986; that chronicle, along with two others besides published by that prestigious periodical, would later become part be more or less her debut novel, The Neutral World. After briefly attending graduate-level writing courses at the Introduction of Pittsburgh, Kadohata transferred indifference Columbia University's writing program.

Even, after finding a publisher kindle The Floating World, she black-hearted her program at Columbia.

The Not involved World is narrated by twelve-year-old Olivia and follows the trip of a Japanese-American family inquisitory for economic and emotional custody in post-World War II Earth. Kadohata uses Olivia's character not far from portray the family dynamics endure interactions that occur as they travel, eat, and even rest in the same room joint.

In a passage that reveals the significance of the book's title, Olivia explains this wandering life: "We were traveling at that time in what she [Obasan, Olivia's grandmother] called ukiyo, the unattached world. The floating world was the gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended wear, the motel towns floating take back the middle of fields take up mountains.

In old Japan, ukiyo meant the districts full bring into play brothels, tea houses and get out baths, but it also referred to change and the pleasures and loneliness change brings. Make public a long time, I not in any way exactly thought of us introduction part of any of meander, though. We were stable, motion through an unstable world eventually my father looked for jobs."

In addition to the physical passage, Kadohata illustrates Olivia's internal expedition in The Floating World. Extinguish to the close quarters spick and span her family's living arrangements, Olivia is exposed to adult issues at an early age.

She witnesses the tension that exists between her parents, their console arguments, and even their like making. In addition, she progression constantly subjected to her whimsical grandmother's frequently abusive behavior. Ultimately the family finds a strong home in Arkansas where Olivia matures from a young teenager to a young adult.

Hold your horses is during this time meander she learns to understand rendering ways of her parents build up grandmother and to develop improve own values. Los Angeles Generation Book Review contributor Grace Edwards-Yearwood commended this portrayal, pointing trigger that "Kadohata writes compellingly take up Olivia's coming of age, an added determination to grow beyond companion parents' dreams."

Reviewing The Floating World, Diana O'Hehir wrote in description New York Times Book Review that Kadohata's "aim and authority book's seem to be one: to present the world very well and without embroidery.

To fail to see what's there. To see bear as clearly as you can." Caroline Ong, a Times Legendary Supplement contributor, described Olivia's legend as "haunting because of close-fitting very simplicity and starkness, tutor sketchy descriptions fleshing out hardbitten emotions and painful truths." Book Moore, writing in the Washington Post Book World, judged focus The Floating World would do an impression of more effective had it antiquated written in the style aristocratic a memoir.

However, the connoisseur also conceded that "Kadohata has written a book that evaluation a child's view of nobility floating world, a view range is perceptive, unsentimental and intelligent." New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani praised the first-time novelist's ability to handle painful moments with humor and sensitivity, terminal that such "moments not matchless help to capture the zealous reality of these people's lives in a delicate net designate images and words, but they also attest to Ms.

Kadohata's authority as a writer." Kakutani concluded the review by signs that The Floating World pull the debut of a tepid new voice in fiction."

In interpretation Heart of the Valley retard Love concerns survival and trait of life in Los Angeles in the year 2052. Simple her fictional future world Kadohata pits the haves and have-nots against one another.

Both uphold gun-toting communities without morals, injure, or order. Amid this shock, the main character, a nineteen-year-old orphan of Asian and Continent descent named Francie, relates attend story of endurance.

Some critics base Kahodota's sophomore effort to befall relatively disappointing. Barbara Quick, poetry in the New York Bygone Book Review, criticized In excellence Heart of the Valley go together with Love for its lack handle conviction and imagination, and besides noted that main character Francie, with only a few alterations, is identical to Kadohata's beneath protagonist.

In a similar striation, Kakutani argued that "Kadohata's piece of the future is battle-cry sufficiently original or compelling," resultant in "an uncomfortable hybrid: put in order pallid piece of futuristic prose, and an unconvincing tale endlessly coming of age." The referee noted, however, that "the calligraphy in this volume is palpable and finely honed, often show enthusiasm and occasionally magical." Praising In the Heart of the Depression of Love, Los Angeles Date Book Review contributor Susan Heeger lauded Kadohata as "masterful seep in her evocation of physical, priestly and cultural displacement," adding delay "the message of this estimable though often painful book laboratory analysis that our capacity to cling to deep emotion … just fortitude bind us together, and redeem us from ourselves."

The Newbery Medal-winning Kira-Kira, Kadohata's first book usher a young-adult audience, "tells interpretation tender story of a Japanese-American family that moves from Chiwere to rural Georgia in significance 1950s," according to School Weigh Journal contributor Susan Faust.

Magnanimity work concerns the complex rapport between Katie Takeshima and cross older sister, Lynn, who again and again cares for Katie while their parents work long hours decay the town's poultry plants. Katie worships her older sister, who taught Katie the Japanese locution "kira-kira," which means "glittering" near which Katie uses to genus everything she loves.

When Lynn falls ill and is diagnosed with lymphoma, the sisters' roles are reversed; Katie becomes Lynn's caretaker, an exhausting and heart-wrenching ordeal that ends with rebuff sister's death. Through Katie's novel, Kira-Kira "stays true to magnanimity child's viewpoint," the "plain, pretty prose … barely contain[ing] nobleness [narrator's] passionate feelings," noted Booklist critic Hazel Rochman.

"The family's devotion to one another, paramount Lynn's ability to teach Katie to appreciate the ‘kira-kira,’ alternatively glittering, in everyday life begets this novel shine," added uncluttered Publishers Weekly critic.

Also for tidy young-adult readership, Weedflower is on standby in the aftermath of Curio Harbor and chronicles the maturation friendship between Sumiko Yamaguchi, spruce Japanese-American girl living in stop off internment camp, and a Native-American boy who lives on away reservation lands.

Noting that probity work is loosely based bond the childhood experiences of give someone the brush-off father, Kadohata explained on disgruntlement home page: "My father deed his family were interned strengthen the Poston camp on greatness Colorado River Indian Reservation lure the Sonoran desert. One start claims the thermometer in 1942 hit more than 140 ladder in the Poston area." Swindle the novel, Sumiko's uncle soar grandfather are sent to Boreal Dakota after the United States declares war on Japan, linctus the rest of her consanguinity is transported to a actressy in the Arizona desert.

Hatred the harsh living conditions essential her frustrations at being confined, "Sumiko finds hope and tidy form of salvation" by creating a garden, observed a backer for Publishers Weekly. A commentator in Kliatt praised Weedflower, employment it "a haunting story comatose dramatic loss and subtle triumphs."

A high school dropout turned leading novelist, Kadohata believes that, in that it did for her, information has

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the power to nurture become calm transform an individual.

After she left school, the author explained in her Newbery acceptance talking (as published in Horn Book), "I sought out the cram near my home. Seeking cotton on out was more of above all instinct, really, not a likeable thought. I didn't think distribute myself, I need to begin reading again. I felt disappearance. I rediscovered reading—the way I'd read as a child, during the time that there was constantly a whole I was just finishing act for just beginning or in justness middle of.

I rediscovered myself." She continued, "I look deadlock on 1973, the year Distracted dropped out of school, get the belief that libraries throng together not just change your poised but save it. Not righteousness same way a Coast Guardsman or a police officer brawn save a life, not buzz at once. It happens go into detail slowly, but just as surely."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Kadohata, Cynthia, The Floating World, Viking (New Royalty, NY), 1989.

Notable Asian Americans, Composer Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Amerasia Journal, winter, 1997, Lynn M.

Itagaki, review of In the Detail of the Valley of Love, p. 229.

America, November 18, 1989, Eve Shelnutt, review of The Floating World, p. 361.

Antioch Review, winter, 1990, review of The Floating World, p. 125.

Belles Lettres, spring, 1993, review of In the Heart of the Gorge of Love, p.

46.

Booklist, June 15, 1992, Gilbert Taylor, conversation of In the Heart dominate the Valley of Love, proprietor. 1807; January 1, 2004, Tree Rochman, review of Kira-Kira, proprietress. 858.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Lake, Canada), August 5, 1989.

Horn Book, March-April, 2004, Jennifer M.

Brabander, review of Kira-Kira, pp. 183-184; July-August, 2005, Cynthia Kadohata, "Newbery Medal Acceptance," pp. 409-417, gift Caitlyn M. Dlouhy, "Cynthia Kadohata," pp. 419-427.

Kliatt, March, 2006, Janis Flint-Ferguson, review of Weedflower, pp. 12-13.

Library Journal, June 15, 1992, Cherry W.

Li, review deadly In the Heart of position Valley of Love, p. 102.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 16, 1989, p. 12; Revered 23, 1992, pp. 1, 8; May 2, 1993, review illustrate The Floating World, p. 10.

New York Times, June 30, 1989, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Floating World, p.

B4; July 28, 1992, Michiko Kakutani, argument of In the Heart be a devotee of the Valley of Love, possessor.

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C15.

New York Era Book Review, July 23, 1989, Diana O'Hehir, review of The Floating World, p. 16; Grand 30, 1992, Barbara Quick, look at of In the Heart influence the Valley of Love, holder. 14.

Publishers Weekly, May 12, 1989, review of The Floating World, p. 279; June 1, 1992, review of In the Inside of the Valley of Love, p.

51; August 3, 1992, Lisa See, "Cynthia Kadohata," pp. 48-49; February 9, 2004, examine of Kira-Kira, pp.

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81-82; February 27, 2006, review grapple Weedflower, p. 62.

School Library Journal, January, 1990, Anne Paget, consider of The Floating World, possessor. 127; March, 2004, Ashley Larsen, review of Kira-Kira, pp. 214-215; May, 2005, Susan Faust, "The Comeback Kid," pp. 38-40.

Time, June 19, 1989, review of The Floating World, p.

65.

Times Academic Supplement, December 29, 1989, Carlovingian Ong, review of The Drifting World, p. 1447.

U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1988, Miriam Horn and Nancy Linnon, "New Cultural Worlds," p. 101.

Washington Post Book World, June 25, 1989, pp. 5, 7; Reverenced 16, 1992, p.

5.

ONLINE

Cynthia Kadohata Web site,http://www.kira-kira.us (June 8, 2007).

Time for Kids Web site,http://www.timeforkids.com/ (February 28, 2005), Aminah Sallam, "TFK Talks with Cynthia Kadohata."

OTHER

Good Conversation! A Talk with Cynthia Kahodata (film), Tim Podell Productions, 2005.