Dr. Ina will share her personal journey as a survivor of the WWII mass incarceration of Japanese Americans and her efforts to bring an understanding of trauma to support healing in her community.

Satsuki Ina, PhD, is a psychotherapist specializing in community trauma. She co-founded Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent, direct-action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites. Ina produced two Emmy-award winning documentaries about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. Recently, she was featured in Rachel Maddow's podcast, "Burn Order," an in-depth dive into the WWII Japanese American incarceration and its relevance for today's threat of mass incarceration of immigrants. In 2025, Ina’s memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest, was released in paperback. A professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About The Poet and the Silk Girl:

In her memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, Satsuki Ina recovers the story of how her parents survived and resisted their incarceration in U.S. concentration camps during WWII. Drawing from diary entries, heart-wrenching haiku, censored letters, government documents, and clandestine messages, Ina shares the eyewitness dispatches of her newlywed parents Shizuko and Itaru Ina. Their words, interwoven with the upheaval of war and Ina’s own retrospective reflection, present an intimate view into the experiences of those whose lives were upended, by reason of race alone, by Executive Order 9066—a presidential edict that dispossessed an entire generation of Japanese people, including U.S. citizens, of their homes and livelihoods.

And the memoir also takes us to the current moment, where Satsuki, a psychotherapist and activist, connects her family’s WWII ordeal to the race and immigration stories unfolding today—from rising anti-Asian hate to the militarization of immigration enforcement.

This event is part of One Book, One Coast, a collaborative program uniting a wide network of West Coast library jurisdictions in a shared celebration of literacy, learning, community, and civil discourse.