Kathryn Tolbert chronicles many of the astonishing stories of “War Brides” who left everything they knew in Japan, to cross an ocean and create new and unpredictable lives in America with the GIs they married following World War II.

Tolbert is our next speaker in the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center “An Afternoon with the Author” series at 1:30 p.m. HST this Saturday, August 20. The event is free and open to the public conveniently via Zoom. To register for the online event, and to receive the Zoom log-in details, call 808-244-NVMC (6862) or go to www.nvmc.org.

Her talk is titled "Finding Homes Among Strangers: The Japanese War Brides"she writes from personal experience. “My mother is one…” Ms. Tolbert writes, “...one of the tens of thousands of young women who married American GIs and came to the United States to make a new life among strangers. I spent a year traveling the country to record interviews, This oral history archive is the result.”

More about Kathryn Tolbert: Kathryn Tolbert is executive director of The War Bride Experience, Inc., a nonprofit organization devoted to telling the stories of the tens of thousands of Japanese “War Brides.” She was a co-director of the short documentary film Fall Seven Times Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides and is the author of the oral history archive atwww.warbrideproject.com. She was a journalist with The Washington Post for more than 25 years, both as an editor and a reporter, and as a correspondent in Tokyo. She previously worked for The Boston Globe and The Associated Press. Kathryn is a graduate of Vassar College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Thanks to technology, NVMC’s “An Afternoon with the Author” invites published fiction and non-fiction writers from around Hawaii and the mainland into our homes. By means of Zoom, the Center hosts a different author each month to talk about their work, the story behind the story, and their personal journey on the way to having their work published. Zoom then makes these presentations available to visitors around the globe, as well as here at home on Maui.

Chosen because of their ties to the Japanese-American experience, each author’s work connects individuals with larger truths and ideas about society. After all, everything that happens in the world can be written and learned from literature which through the centuries has shaped civilizations, changed political systems, exposed injustice and observed the human condition. Literature is the foundation of humanity's cultures, beliefs, and traditions.