Shareen K. Murayama
Shareen K. Murayama is a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet and educator. Her debut poetry collection, Housebreak, is forthcoming by Bad Betty Press (July 2022). She’s a 2021 Best Microfiction winner, a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and Asst. CNF Editor for JMWW. Her works have been published or forthcoming in The McNeese Review, The Willowherb Review, National Flash Fiction, The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Press, and elsewhere. She lives in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. You can find her on IG and Twitter @ambusypoeming.
Praise for Hey Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group?:
In this collection of wonderfully loose, limber, nimble poems, Shareen K. Murayama explores the complex notions of the model minority and privilege and their bearing on Asian-American identity. She does so within the context of a place—Hawaii, with its “economic myth of paradise”—where questions of racial and ethnic identity are as sharp-edged as coral. And like coral, these poems are bright, porous, and spiny all at once. They’re also, in turns, brutal and beautiful, sad and funny. Even as they detail suicides and hate crimes, the poems maintain a roguish love and hopefulness toward what can be found in the tourist traps and secret forests of the place the poet calls home. “Surely,” she writes, “we can find a way to start a new game.”
—Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century
In Hey Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group?, Shareen K. Murayama navigates, deftly, the ocean of self, filled with eddies of being a woman, shoals of being Asian, razor sharp reefs of being American. She surfs sets of being good enough, being a good daughter, mother, grandmother, fighting the undertow of expectations. Paddling through the rough, the calm, waters of Hawai’i, she offers you a glimpse of her world through her words.
—Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Author of Hard Skin
Courage is required of us any time we listen to or read the story of another because we must, if we are to truly hear the place from which poems and people speak, step out of our comfort zones and into the lived experience of another. We must know the risks and the odds of survival, of being seen, are differentially experienced in a world, such as ours, that insists on staying broken, blind and uncaring of so many lives which must daily live under the insidious mechanisms of oppression and injustice. Here, Shareen K. Murayama asks of us: from what place in the world do you speak? From what place do you listen? The two cannot be the same. Only when one listens, bravely, with a naked heart, can one truly hear what these poems tell us. Knowing that the world we live in is the world we have made, what will we choose to do with what we know? It's when the questions unsettle us that we might find the answer.
—James Diaz author of This Someone I Call Stranger