An Evening with Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh

The Visiting Writers Series and English Department are thrilled to present an evening with acclaimed writer Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, who will read from her award winning memoir, unMothered, unTongued.  An audience Q&A and book signing will follow the event.
 

unMothered, unTongued is a collection of lyric essays written from the liminal space of the in-between. These essays thread themselves around questions of language, landscape, and identity, weaving together intersectionalities and intertextualities. Author Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, a biracial LGBTQIA+ Nisei who was born and raised in Laramie, Wyoming, to a non-native-English-speaking Issei mother, considers not only the tensions in the rifts between intersectional identities (biracial Nisei, LGBTQIA+) but also the tensions between marginalized identities and the landscapes and cultures of the American West; the tensions between nonnative, second, erased, and/or forgotten languages; and the tensions between those who abuse and those who survive. These rifts, intersections, and fractures, while frequently a source of violence and immense grief, are also a source of illumination and clarity. The essays in this collection are written almost entirely in hybrid/lyric forms—oftentimes braided, oftentimes patchworked, oftentimes segmented—reflecting some of the fractured complexities and intersections of Horikoshi Roripaugh’s own hybrid identities.
 

About Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh
Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (Milkweed Editions, 2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards.

Her book of lyric essays, unMothered, unTongued, winner of the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the 2024 AWP Award Series, was published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2025. Their fiction collection, Reveal Codes, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press in 2023, and her chapbook, #stringofbeads, a winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition, was published by Diode Press in 2023. Horikoshi Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. Seven of their essays have been listed as Notable Essays in Best American Essays, and her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Story Magazine, Terrain.org, Hotel Amerika, and North American Review, among others.