One More Week to Meet Our Goal! Meet Writers on Identity, Culture, and Family History

One more week to go to meet our $75,000 fundraising goal! This week, meet three alums who are writing about identity, culture, and family history: Susan Ito, Julian Brave Noisecat, and Margaret Juhae Lee.

Susan Kiyo Ito

“Writing my memoir, many pages of which were written in Mesa’s East Shed, pushed the edges of how I understood identity, secrets, and family. Now I am working on two novels: one, about a little-known ‘edge’ of history: Japanese Americans in New York City during World War II, as well as a young adult novel about a Japanese American family facing an unexpected teen pregnancy, and its cultural and personal repercussions.”

Susan is the author of I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir and co-editor of the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. A member of the Writer’s Grotto, her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, and Catapult, among others. Susan has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the United States and adapted Untold Stories: Life, Love, and Reproduction for the theater. She is on the faculty of the MFA Programs at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. Learn more at thesusanito.com. 

Julian Brave NoiseCat

“Mesa Refuge will always have a special place in my heart because it’s where I finished the first draft of my first book, We Survived the Night, which will be published in 2025. Kamala told us we would get more writing done than we anticipated. I didn’t believe her and then there I was, two days before the end of my residency with a full first draft of my book.”

Julian is a writer, filmmaker and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, SUGARCANE, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school his family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. SUGARCANE premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where they won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was acquired by National Geographic Documentary Films and will screen at film festivals and on Disney+. Find him at julianbravenoisecat.com/.

Margaret Juhae Lee

“For me, Mesa Refuge has been a sacred writing space, a place where I can clear my mind of the constant loop of chatter and their accompanying images. It’s a place of drift, of telling details, on the edge of consciousness and civilization, where my true inner self can emerge.”

Margaret is the author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History, which she started 20 years ago at her first Mesa Refuge residency, and then finished at her second residency last year. She received a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard University and a Korean Studies Fellowship from the Korean Foundation in support of research for her book. Previously, she was an editor for the Books and the Arts section at The Nation. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have been published in The Nation, Newsday, Elle, ARTnews, The Advocate, The Progressive and most recently in The Rumpus and Ploughshares Blog. Find her at margaretjuhaelee.com/.