If a price is not listed, the event is free!

The Gate of Memory: Poetry, Healing, & Imagining Nikkei Futures
Haymarket House, Chicago, IL
Saturday, June 14, 2025 @ 2-5pm

Past Events

Delta Mouth Literary Festival
Baton Rouge, LA
Friday, March 21, 2025

Archives as Portal Through Past, Present, and Future (w/Cori Nakamura Lin)
University of Illinois- Chicago
March 18 and 20, 2025

Blurred, Hybrid, and Speculative: Crossing Boundaries in Creative Nonfiction ($315)
StoryStudio Chicago (Virtual)
Tuesdays, March 4, 11, 18, 25, 2025, 6:30-8:30pm CST
This wide-ranging class dips our toes into some of the many hybrid, genre-blurring forms available to nonfiction writers today. We’ll investigate a variety of structures (including hermit crabs and braided researched essays), experiment with incorporating visual imagery into our work (no art skills necessary!), and dive into the expansive possibilities of speculative nonfiction. We’ll ask: how can stepping outside the bounds create new radical possibilities for our work? What opportunities do such forms provide for those of us whose voices are traditionally marginalized? How can experimenting with form bring joy and curiosity back into our writing?

Style, Structure, and Self-Accommodation ($75)
Tin House Winter Craft Intensive (Virtual)
Saturday, January 25, 2025, 9am-12pm PST (11am-2pm CST)
Those of us who identify as neurodivergent, live with chronic fatigue or other symptoms, and/or have a psychiatric disability/mental illness often have to adapt our writing schedule and process to fit our specific needs. Yet we don’t always think about how our contexts affect our writing craft itself, as most craft advice is tailored towards neurotypical writers. In this class, we’ll experiment with harnessing craft choices to a) create a more supportive and accessible atmosphere for ourselves on the page and b) reveal our own unique thinking processes and embodiment.

The Girls of Godzilla, Illinois Author Talk
Folger Shakespeare Library (Virtual)
Thursday, January 16th, 2025 @ 5:30pm EST (4:30pm CST)

Minding the Gaps: Speculative Nonfiction as Repair
Carlow University, Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, January 4th, 2025 @ 1pm EST
The genre of speculative nonfiction provides space to investigate truths through fabulism, folklore, imagined lives, hauntedness, and other slanted lenses. In this class, we’ll discuss the expansive possibilities and definitions of the genre, learn specific craft techniques, and play with the freedom it offers (particularly for those of us from marginalized communities) to challenge society’s definitions of reality. Together, we’ll both mine the gaps and mind the gaps in our personal and communal archives to renegotiate the past, interrogate the present, and imagine the future.

Rolling Reading Series Presents: Jami Nakamura Lin
Penn State University, November 14, 2024, 7pm

Writing from the Boundaries: The Craft of Fabulist & Speculative Nonfiction
6-week class at Writing Co-lab. Wednesdays, October 2-November 6, 2024

Writers Festival at StoryStudio
Memoir as Play, Memoir as Experiment with Jami Nakamura Lin 

When writing about your own life, it’s easy to get stuck. Sometimes your stories feel too complicated, difficult, or painful to communicate. Sometimes you’ve told the same anecdote so many times that it feels wooden and calcified in your hands. Sometimes your material is so close that you lack the necessary critical distance to write about it. 

A memory can be unlocked as soon as we discover the right shape to hold it— and sometimes the right shape is unconventional. Experimenting with uninhabited craft choices can help break us out of our ruts and bring joy back into the occasionally fraught experience of memoir writing. In this class, we will play with speculation, shape, structure, point of view, time, and more. We’ll investigate untraditional memoir forms, read published examples from a diverse range of memoir writers, and finally let loose with our own exercises. Feel free to bring 1-2 pages of a place in your own writing where you feel particularly stuck (not required).

Carrying What Haunts Us (Grief Writing Workshop)
Northwestern University
Wednesday, April 10, 2024, 5-6:30pm
Press writeup here

Japanese American Incarceration: Healing Histories Across Generations
Chicago History Center
Sunday, February 18, 2024, 2-4pm
This Day of Remembrance main event will feature a conversation between Midwest based keynote speakers Jami Nakamura Lin, author of “The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir,” and Dr. Donna Nagata, researcher of intergenerational impact from Japanese American incarceration. Advanced registration is required; reception to follow.

Past Book Tour Events

Haunted Prose at Printers Row Lit Fest
Saturday, September 9, 2023 @ 2PM
With Ananda Lima, Bruce Owens Grimm, John Duffy, and Sandra Miller

JASC Reading with traci kato-kiriyama
Sunday, August 23, 2023 @ 1-3pm

Evergreen: In Conversation with Naomi Hirahara
Monday, August 6, 2023 @ 6:30pm
Volumes Book Cafe, 1373 N. Milwaukee Ave, Chicago
Join us as we welcome the author of the bestselling and award winning book CLARK & DIVISION to talk about her new book, EVERGREEN. She will be joined in conversation with author Jami Nakamura Lin!