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Susan Ito for “I Would Meet You Anywhere”
June 10, 2024 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Free

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.
Susan Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, and a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption.
Alice Stephens is the author of the novel, Famous Adopted People, as well as a book reviewer, essayist, short story writer, facilitator of the Adoptee Voices Writing Group, member of the Starlings Collective, and co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival.
If you’d like to purchase this title online and still support People’s Book, follow the link below:
https://bookshop.org/a/88548/9780814258835
This is an in-person event. Seated capacity at People’s Book is 50 patrons. Standing room is an option. All events are first-come, first-served seating. Accessible seating is always available.


