Join Albany Reads as they launch a three-month, community-wide reading experience inspired by The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest by Albany author Satsuki Ina. Through films, art, poetry, history talks, cultural programs, and conversations on civil liberties and belonging, Albany Reads invites neighbors of all ages to learn from the past and imagine a more just future together.

Receive a complimentary copy of The Poet and the Silk Girl (while supplies last), watch Defiant to the Last: Resistance at the Tule Lake Jail by award-winning filmmaker Emiko Omori, and hear a special presentation from author Satsuki Ina, followed by a live Q&A. Participants will also continue Albany’s collective effort to fold 10,000 origami cranes, a shared act of remembrance, resilience, and hope.

Satsuki Ina is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma, an acclaimed author, filmmaker, and longtime social justice advocate. Her work helps individuals and communities affected by oppression reclaim their voices and transform systems of injustice. A cofounder of Tsuru for Solidarity, a nonviolent direct-action network working to end the detention of immigrants, she has produced two award-winning documentaries on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Children of the Camps and From a Silk Cocoon. Dr. Ina has been featured in major national media outlets, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Democracy Now!, the documentary And Then They Came for Us, and, most recently, the Rachel Maddow podcast Burn Order. A professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento, she lives in Albany.