Diana Morita Cole
Diana Morita Cole is the author of Sideways: Memoir of a Misfit. which recounts her birth in the Minidoka concentration camp during WWII. She writes for the Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper for the Japanese American Citizens League. In 2017, she was awarded the Richard Carver Award for Emerging Writers. She organizes the annual Asian Heritage Event and is a member of the Nelson Storytelling Guild in Nelson, British Columbia.
Updated September 2018
Stories from This Author
Civil Rights Champion — Art Shibayama
Sept. 27, 2018 • Diana Morita Cole
Art (Isamu) Shibayama, civil rights champion of the Japanese Latin Americans and the recipient of the 2002 Fighting Spirit Award, died peacefully with family by his bedside on July 31, 2018 in San Jose, California. He was 88. Born in Lima Peru in 1930, Art was 13 years old when he, along with his family, was kidnapped and transported to the United States aboard the USAT Cuba in 1944. Immediately upon their arrival in New Orleans, they were arrested by …
Minidoka Pilgrimage
Aug. 11, 2016 • Diana Morita Cole
Returning to my birthplace for the first time after 72 years wasn’t quite the thrill I might have hoped for. After all, my “home” wasn’t anything like the houses I’d grown to admire from reading Dick and Jane stories when I was a kid in school. Instead, my “home” was a single small room occupied by my parents, my two sisters, and me in a tarpapered, prison barrack that was little more than a shack out in a god-forsaken Idaho …
