Anne Shimojima

Anne Shimojima, a retired school library media specialist, has been telling stories from her Asian heritage and around the world for forty years at festivals, schools, libraries, senior communities, museums, and lately, on Zoom. She was a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in 2017 and has twice been a Teller-in-Residence at the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN. Other past venues include the Illinois Storytelling Festival, Timpanogos Storytelling Conference, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Chicago History Museum, and Illinois Holocaust Museum. In 2019, Anne's CD Sakura Tales: Stories from Japan, won a Storytelling World Resource Honor Award.

In 2006 Anne created her story Hidden Memory: An American World War II Story, about her Japanese American family's immigration to the United States and through the incarceration camps of World War II. In 2019 she was invited by the government of Japan to tell her story to three Tokyo high schools and in 2022 Anne was decorated with the Order of the Rising Sun, Silver Rays, conferred by His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, for her work in promoting Japanese culture in the United States.

Read more about Anne on her website.

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