Fourth Annual Women Writers Series

Lois-Ann Yamanaka is the author of the poetry collection Saturday Night at the Pahala Theartre (1993), for which she won the Elliot Cades Award for literature, the Association for Asian American Studies Natioal Book Award, a National Endowment for the Artist grant, a Pushcart Prize, and strong critical praise.

Yamnaka was born in Pahala, on the island of Hawaii and received both her bachelor?s and master?s degrees in education from the University of Hawaii and Manoa. She currently resides in Honolulu.

Dawn Turner Trice, an editor at the Chicago Tribune for nearly ten years, was born in Chicago in 1965. She grew up in a high-rise apartment building on the city?s South Side in a community not unlike her novel?s Thirty sixth Street setting. In 1995, an excerpt from Only Twice I?ve Wished for Heaven won Trice an Illinois Ars Council Award for prose. This incredibly vivid novel is a story self-published of assuredness and hope, loss, and destruction. It is a story about children dying- as one character puts it-? I ?In ways that don?t always call for burying.?

Kirkus Reviews writes, ?The magic is in the telling here, creating a fabulous novel that discovers transcendent possibilities on the mean streets of a city. Trice?s greatest achievement may be how effortlessly (and modestly) she manages to mingle an original vision and real art.?