Akemi Johnson

Akemi is the author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at several universities. A former Fulbright scholar to Japan, Akemi has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation and more. At Mesa Refuge, she worked on a nonfiction book utilizing history, memoir, and reportage to subvert the conventional narrative about the U.S. government’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII by telling the story of Tule Lake concentration camp.