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Meet Author Jamie Ford

Dr. Audrey Lavin Speaking of Books Author Series

The author of "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet," winner of the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature will join us to discuss his work. Q & A, book selling, and signing will follow.

Jamie Ford joins us to discuss Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, an historical novel that centers around the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to internment camps; the book depicts the pain and trauma of separation through the friendship of the Chinese-American Henry and his Japanese-American friend Keiko.

From April 26, 2022-July 22, 2022, the Canton Museum of Art will exhibit Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii and Asian Voices from the CMA Collection.

Witness to Wartime: The Painted Diary of Takuichi Fujii is curated by Barbara Johns, PhD, and the traveling exhibition is organized by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.

Jamie Ford is a Northwest author most widely known for his bestselling Seattle-based novels. His debut, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction. Hotel was named the #1 Book Club pick in 2010 by the American Bookseller Association and is now read widely in schools all across the country. This multi-cultural tale was adapted by Book-It Repertory Theatre, and has recently been optioned for a stage musical, and also for film, with George Takei serving as Executive Producer.

Jamie's second book, Songs of Willow Frost, was also a national bestseller. His third novel set in Seattle, Love and Other Consolation Prizes, was published in 2017 and Library Journal named it one of the Best Historical Fiction Novels of 2017. An award-winning short-story writer, his work has been published in multiple anthologies, from Asian-themed steampunk set in Seattle in the Apocalypse Triptych, to stories exploring the universe of masked marvels and caped crusaders from an Asian American perspective in Secret Identities: The first Asian American Superhero Anthology, and Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology. His essays on race, identity, love, heroes, and complex families have been published nationwide and his work has been translated into 35 languages. He says he’s holding out for Klingon, because that’s when you know you’ve made it. 

Jamie is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer, Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations.  Having grown up near Seattle’s Chinatown, he now lives in Montana where he’s on a never-ending search for decent dim sum.