We end our Season 3 podcast with a special finale episode with our esteemed guest, Min Jin Lee. This episode was streamed from our 2023 Leadership Awards Celebration, “Finding Our Way” where the theme was designed to highlight the accomplishments of those who have defied odds to protect their culture and identity, as well as ensure our stories are being authentically told and preserved.

Min Jin Lee Lee is a writer whose award-winning fiction explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, religion, gender, and identity of a diasporic people. Pachinko, her second novel, is an epic story which follows a Korean family who migrates to Japan; it is the first novel written for an adult, English-speaking audience about the Korean-Japanese people. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017. A New York Times Bestseller, Pachinko was also a Top 10 Books of the Year for the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the New York Public Library. Pachinko was a selection for “Now Read This,” the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and The New York Times. It was on over 75 best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN. Pachinko has been translated into over 35 languages and is an international bestseller. President Barack Obama selected Pachinko for his recommended reading list, calling it, “a powerful story about resilience and compassion.”

In the finale of the 3 part episode, the exploration of bi-racial identity ends with LEAP’s Assistant Director of Leadership Development, Akemi Mechtel. Akemi has a decade’s worth of experience working across non-profit and profit sectors.After graduating from Augsburg University in Minneapolis, she started her career in education working as a tireless advocate for accessibility and equity in the classroom. After witnessing the barriers her students faced she went back to school to better understand the impact of policy in our communities, and obtained a Master’s in Public Policy. She has impacted both large government systems and small nonprofits to think critically about the way that race shows up in how we do our work, and build better systems that decentralize power, maintain momentum, and push back against the status quo.

This episode is a continuation of exploring bi-racial identity. In this episode, our hosts interview Curtiss Takada Rooks, Ph.D., a critical race and ethnic studies scholar in Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola Marymount University (LMU). Currently, Dr. Takada Rooks serves as the LMU Asian Pacific American Studies program coordinator teaching courses in multiracial identity, contemporary issues in APIA communities and systems thinking.  Dr. Takada Rooks holds a doctorate in Comparative Culture, with an emphasis in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Born at Camp Zama, Japan to an African American father and native Japanese mother, Dr. Takada Rooks now lives in Culver City, CA with wife Miki Fujimoto. They along with their daughter Mariko are active in the Los Angeles area Japanese American community.