The Poet and the Silk Girl by Satsuki Ina @ Central

Satsuki Ina author of: The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest discusses her book, as well as her work and activism.

Satsuki Ina author of: The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest discusses her book, as well as her work and activism.

From Albany author, psychotherapist, and activist Satsuki Ina, The Poet and the Silk Girl is a powerful and intimate love story set against one of the gravest violations of civil liberties in American history. Newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were beginning their life together when the U.S. government forcibly removed them from their home and incarcerated them in wartime concentration camps solely because of their Japanese ancestry. Under pressure, they renounced their citizenship and were labeled enemy aliens, their family scattered across the country.

Born during their imprisonment, Ina reconstructs her parents’ story through diaries, photographs, clandestine letters, and haiku, revealing how they managed love, loss, separation, and loyalty tests amid wartime hysteria. Through one family’s experience, the book illuminates the broader struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted injustice, fought to reclaim their rights, and held fast to their humanity amid fear and prejudice.

Satsuki Ina is a licensed psychotherapist who has spent her professional career seeking to understand the long-term impact of collective and historic trauma. She is co-organizer of Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots coalition formed to protest current policies that echo and reverberate the racism and hate so resonant of the historical Japanese American incarceration. She has produced two documentary films, Children of the Camps and From A Silk Cocoon, and is the author of a memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl.

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This program is part of the Albany Reads series, bringing our community together around The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest by Satsuki Ina. Through shared reading and related events, we reflect on history, foster dialogue, and connect past injustices to present-day conversations about civil liberties and belonging.

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