Living in Washington, D.C., allows Thalhammer to be close to the political action. It’s important for her to be part of the national conversation. She participates in rallies supporting LGBTQ rights as well as the Women’s March.
Although I grew up in the Northern Virginia area, with the third largest Korean American population in the United States, I always felt foreign, even in my own neighborhood. Adults butchered my name “Dahye” until I finally changed it to “Grace,” just to get through morning roll call.
In 1793, while Hawai‘i was still an independent republic, British Captain George Vancouver gifted King Kamehameha I a small amount of cattle that quickly multiplied. In the early nineteenth century, several Mexican vaqueros (cowboys) were sent to the islands to teach Hawaiians how to ride horses and maintain the cattle. Roping cattle and riding horses seem fitting in the prairie grasslands of Oklahoma, but the Hawaiian style of cowboy traditions is unique to the landscape.
Angel Island Immigration Station was built in 1910 in the San Francisco Bay mainly to process immigrants from China, Japan, and other countries on the Pacific Rim. Its primary mission was to better enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other anti-Asian laws enacted in subsequent years.
What inspires Acevedo more than anything else are uncelebrated heroes. While pursuing an MFA in creative writing, she realized she wished to dedicate her writing to this idea. She felt somewhat isolated, as the only student in the program of African descent, of an immigrant background, and from a large city.