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.

Listen to this special 3 part episode with hosts Linda Akutagawa, LEAP President CEO and Dr. Yon Na, Organizational Psychologist as they interview Karla Thomas Deputy Director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities(EPIC). EPIC was established in 2009 by a group of young Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islander (NHPI) leaders who recognized the urgency to address the growing needs of NHPI families. Karla Thomas is the oldest daughter to her Samoan mother and Aymara father, who came to the U.S. from Vatia, Tutuila Samoa and Quime, Bolivia. She was raised on Serrano and Tongva land, in the city of San Bernardino, California. Karla serves as the Deputy Director of Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC) and has a public health background, holding a Master of Public Health with a focus on health policy. Karla is an alumnus of the LEAP Impact Program. 

The increase presence of API stories in film is evidence of how our stories of identity are shifting. Tune in the LEAP Podcast Episode 6 with Linda Akutagawa, LEAP President CEO and Yon Na, organizational psychologist discuss with Center for Asian American Media(CAAM) Director of Media Don Young who is a longtime documentary production executive and advocate for Asian American storytelling. Don in 2022 executive produced the Peabody Awards Nominee Rising Against Asian Hate, and served as a planning member on the historic Vincent Chin 40th Remembrance and Rededication activities in Detroit.

Kana is a narrative strategist and nonprofit leader with 10 years of experience launching programs, organizations, mobile apps and digital campaigns. In addition to Asian American Futures, Kana has worked on the May 19th Project, the Butterfly lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy at Race Forward, Emerging Radiance, Omidyar Network and YCore. Kana holds a BA in ethnic studies and an MBA, both from Stanford University.

Tune in to the LEAP Podcast Episode 5 with Linda Akutagawa, LEAP President CEO and Yon Na, organizational psychologist as they have Kana Hammon, a narrative strategist and non profit leader, share her insights from the report on the personas and the change of narratives with time and age.

Dr. Vishayka Desai, who spent her childhood in post-Independence India, her graduate and doctoral education in the U.S. and had a globe spanning career as an Asian art scholar, President of a major cultural institution and is now a special advisor to the President and scholar at Columbia University, shares her story of her childhood, pieces of her identity that she used today and the methodology of her navigating numerous roles in her professional career. In this episode, Dr. Vishayka shares wisdom from her personal experiences and her cultural “in-between-ness” on how she changed the perception about Asian art.

Lee Herrick is the the 10th California Poet Laureate, the first Asian American in his role, and is the 2nd guest on LEAP’s Season 3 podcast. He is the author of three books of poems, Scar and Flower, Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. Herrick was born in South Korea and was adopted to a family in California. In this episode, he shares about his pursuit for the arts particularly in poetry and how poetry has helped him find his voice in sharing his story.