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Jami Nakamura Lin

Biography

Jami Nakamura Lin

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir THE NIGHT PARADE. A former Catapult columnist, she’s been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, We Need Diverse Books and more. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area.

Jami Nakamura Lin

Books by Jami Nakamura Lin

The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir
by Jami Nakamura Lin - Memoir, Nonfiction

As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of Jami Nakamura Lin’s adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments. Her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father’s cancer grasped hold of their family. As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin became frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she’d loved as a child --- tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways that fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.