Past Forward

Dr. Gioia Woods earned her Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in American and Environmental Literature from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1999. She is a Professor of Humanities in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies where she teaches classes in environmental humanities; race, ethnicity, and gender; and cultural studies. Her ongoing scholarship and publications are in American and comparative literatures, ecocriticism,...

This is an introduction to Season Five of Chapters. In this episode we document the year 2025, with context from our past, and we learn moving forward. Our goal with this new series is to explore the word incarceration as it relates to the experience of Japanese Americans following Executive Order 9066. We also want to consider the word incarceration and its effect on communities, families, and individuals through conversations wit...

When we started this project in August of 2024 we were focused on the fact that 18 out of the 20 most destructive fires in California’s history have happened in the last 25 years, and 15 of them in the last 10 years. Everything changed when we started recording and fires spread all over the region. 

If you live in the Western United States, there is a high likelihood you have been directly or indirectly affected by wildfires. That i...

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he also serves as the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research. Puchner completed his BA at the Universität Konstanz; MA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at UC Irvine; and PhD at Harvard University. 

A recent fellow of both the Guggenheim Foundation and Cullman C...

Heidi Beirich is the Co-Founder, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.  Beirich is also an Advisory Board Member of the Network for Hate Studies based out of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the former Intelligence Project Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Intelligence Project, which publishes the award-winning Intelligence Report ...

A Macondo fellow, Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the poetry collections Iconistas! (Lit Kit Collective, 2025), the daughterland poems (El Martillo Press, 2023), and Burn Scars, (Lit Kit Collective, 2022). She is the author of the short story collection Graft (Tolsun Books, 2022), and the forth coming collection Chicana Noir: Stories (El Martillo Press, 2026).  She’s the co-editor of the forthcoming Red Flag Warning: Mutual...

Kristi Lippire is a Los Angeles–based sculptor and professor whose work investigates the intersections of material culture, urban infrastructure, and visual theory. A specialist in color theory, she conducts long-form research into the social, historical, and perceptual structures that shape the built environment. Her practice often draws on archives, photography, and site-specific observation, translating architectural elements in...

Jaime L. Jacobsen is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Communication and the Director of the Center for Science Communication at Colorado State University. She is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who has over a decade of experience collaborating with diverse communities across the globe to craft and share compelling social justice, human rights, and scientific stories. Jaime has worked in a variety of cross-cultural con...

Ann Burroughs is the President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of human rights and social justice. She is the Chair of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA and was formerly Chair of Amnesty International’s Global Assembly. Her life-long commitment to racial and social justice was shaped by her experience as a young activist in her native South...

Kathryn Bannai was lead counsel in Gordon Hirabayashi's coram nobis case from 1982 to early 1985. Among other critical work, she successfully defeated the government’s effort to dismiss Hirabayashi’s case and persuaded the court to grant an evidentiary hearing. That hearing led to overturning Hirabayashi’s convictions for resisting the curfew and exclusion orders promulgated under E.O. 9066. 

In addition to practicing law, she adjud...

Tamiko Nimura, Ph.D., is an award-winning Asian American (Sansei/Pinay) creative nonfiction writer, community journalist, and public historian. She writes from an interdisciplinary space at the intersection of her love of literature, grounding in American ethnic studies, inherited wisdom from teachers and activists, and storytelling through history. Her work has appeared in a variety of national and international outlets, including...

Soji Kashiwagi has been the Executive Director and Playwright of the Grateful Crane Ensemble since its founding in 2001. As a playwright, Soji's works such as "The Camp Dance: The Music & The Memories" and "Nihonmachi: The Place to Be" have been seen nationally at JACL conventions in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Chicago, and most recently at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Other works include "The J-Town Jaz...

John Mills has changed the way we live with fire through his 501c3 non-profit organization Watch Duty. John spent many years in Silicon Valley focusing on underserved markets that had been overlooked by technologists. In 2012 he founded Zenput as CTO, focused on retail food services operations which was acquired in 2022. 

After living in San Francisco for 16 years, he moved off-the-grid to Sonoma County in 2020 where he was faced wi...

Chessie Thacher is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, where she devotes her time to First Amendment issues, government transparency, criminal justice reforms, and voting rights litigation.   Prior to joining the ACLU, Chessie worked as an attorney at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP, a San Francisco-based law firm that focuses on high-stakes litigation and trials. While at the firm, Chessie developed a dynamic ...

Dr. Adwoa Opong is an Assistant Professor of History at Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University. Dr Opong earned a BA in history in the study of religions from the University of Ghana. She continued at the University of Ghana to pursue an MPhil in History, focusing on women’s organization and the nationalist struggles in Ghana. Adwoa received her PhD in History and also received her graduate...

Takeo Rivera is a specialist in performance studies with a focus on race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. American cultural production. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Boston University.  His current project, Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity (Oxford University Press, April 2022) is focused on masochism and techno-orientalism in Asian American cultural produc...

Abdi Soltani has served as the executive director of the ACLU of Northern California since 2009. During his tenure, he has pursued long-term priorities to deepen the ACLU’s presence in the California Central Valley and elevate the ACLU’s voice on state policy at the California state capitol. Through 2015, he co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy with then Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, where he helped draft the blue...

John Fischer has served as director of the Normal Public Library since 2023. In this role, Fischer leads teams responsible for the educational, cultural, informational and recreational resources provided by the library to enrich the quality of life for Normal citizens. Fischer has worked in public libraries for more than 20 years, including time at Bloomington Public Library and St. Louis County Library.

Without Libraries was create...

David Weinstein has been Trust for Public Land’s Western Conservation Finance Director for a decade. He advises local and state governments throughout the Western United States on how to design, pass, and implement legislative initiatives and ballot measures that create funding for land and water conservation and climate-smart solutions. A Wyss Foundation Fellow and Coloradoan, David has been involved in conservation politics and p...