Black Lawrence poet Larry Matsuda will read from his book A Cold Wind from Idaho at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington on Veterans Day, November 11. The reading begins at 2 o’clock and lasts until 4.
LARRY MATSUDA was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center during World War II. He and his family along with 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in one of ten concentration camps without a crime and without due process for approximately three years. Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was recently a visiting professor at Seattle University. He was a junior high language arts teacher and Seattle School District administrator and principal for twenty-seven years. He studied poetry under the late professor Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has participated in the Castilla Poetry Reading Series there. He has read his poetry at numerous events in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, including the famous Kobo at Higo’s venue in Seattle’s International District with his mentor, Tess Gallagher. His poems appear in the Poets Against the War website, The Raven Chronicles, and the International Examiner newspaper. In 2005 he and two colleagues co-edited the textbook Community and Difference: Teaching,Pluralism and Social Justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York. The book won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. He lives with his wife, Karen, and son, Matthew, in Seattle and is a consultant presently helping to re-design schools as better physical learning environments.
