Join us for the live reading and multimedia presentation of NOT YO’ BUTTERFLY: MY LONG SONG OF RELOCATION, RACE, LOVE, AND REVOLUTION by Nobuko Miyamoto, artivist and founder of L.A. based multicultural arts organization The Great Leap (release Jun 15th, 2021). We’ll follow up with a discussion including NOT YO’ BUTTERFLY editor Deborah Wong and journalist Kevin Powell. This event is free and open to all and will be accessible through our Facebook and Youtube pages (@busboysandpoets)
Please RSVP if you are interested in purchasing a book bundle (shipping included)
The program will start out with an introduction from our Director of Operations before we start our program with Miyamoto’s musical offerings and photos related to her journey of writing NOT YO’ BUTTERLY. We’ll follow up with a live reading from NOT YO’ BUTTERFLY by Miyamoto and then get right into it with Miyamoto and our guest speakers. Discussion of anti-Asian violence and rhetoric, anti-Black violence and rhetoric, miscegenation laws, etc in the United States will be discussed during this program. There will be time for Q&A with the audience before we end our program.
About NOT YO’ BUTTERFLY: Not Yo' Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto--artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art. Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand--considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her story intersects with Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots--and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation. Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, oft-provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.
Nobuko Miyamoto is an artivist who uses song, dance and theater to explore ways to reclaim and decolonize our minds, bodies, histories, communities, and to create solidarity across cultural borders. Originally a dancer performing on Broadway and in films, she found her own voice as an activist and singer in the Asian American Movement creating with Chris Iijima and Charlie Chin the iconic album A Grain of Sand (1973, Paredon/Smithsonian Folkways). In 1978 she established Great Leap, creating musicals, concerts, albums, music videos and most recently FandangObon, a festival of art, cultures, earth. Nobuko has just released a double album, 120,000 Stories, with Smithsonian Folkways. In June 2021, her memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love and Revolution will be published by University of California Press (@miyamoto_nobuko)
Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, and author of 14 books, including When We Free The World. He lives and thrives in Brooklyn, New York.
