About Shizue Seigel/ Bio
Shizue Seigel is a third-generation
Japanese American writer and visual artist with a passion for
retrieving and interpreting the over-looked and untold. She is
the author of In Good Conscience:
Supporting Japanese Americans During the Internment and Century of Change.
.
She was born in 1946, too late to be
interned like her parents and grandparents, but she earned her first dollar picking
strawberries in a migrant labor camp for former internees. As a
child she shuttled from Occupied Japan to segregated Baltimore and skid-row Stockton. Later, she followed San
Francisco’s zeitgeist to the Haight in the ’60s, Montgomery Street in the ’80s, Sixth and Mission in the ’90s and today’s Japantown.
After studio arts training in painting and
printmaking in the late 1970s, she developed a successful
career in corporate America as an advertising art director at
J. Walter Thompson, DDB Needham, and Charles Schwab, Inc.
Clients included Chevron, Kaiser, the Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, Wells Fargo Bank, the Golden Gate National
Recreation Area, and the Angel Island Immigration Station
Foundation.
In 1993, she abandoned corporate life to
collaborate with marginalized African American women on
reality-based HIV-prevention “role model stories”
for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was a
life-changing experience which sparked a passion for
story-telling as a way to illuminate the impact of
socio-political injustice on the lives of ordinary people.
After several years working with the poor,
homeless and addicted, she began working with the Japanese
American community in 1999, as editor/art director of Nikkei Heritage, the
quarterly magazine of the National Japanese American Historical
Society, then as English editor/art director for the Hokubei Mainichi’s bilingual magazine, The
Beam. She is now writing and
art-directing her third book on Japanese American: Children of Manzanar, commissioned by the Manzanar History Association and
funded by the Mead Foundation. Previous books were the
California Civil Liberties Public Education Program’s In Good
Conscience: Supporting Japanese
Americans During the Internment and
the privately commissioned Century of Change: The Memoirs of Nellie Nakamura.
She teaches the Senior Asian American
Women’s Writers Group at the Japanese Community and
Cultural Center. Her poetry and prose have been published in regional and national
anthologies. Her artwork has appeared group shows and
anthologies. She has written extensively for the Japanese
American vernacular press and is a compelling public speaker
who has been invited to speak throughout California and in the
Pacific Northwest..
