Dungan Lecture: Ruth Ozeki in conversation with Chekwube Danladi

Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker, novelist, and Zen Buddhist priest, whose award-winning novels have been described as “witty, intelligent and passionate” by The Independent, and as possessing “shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness and kinetic pizzazz” by the Chicago Tribune.

Her first novel, My Year of Meats, garnered widespread glowing reviews, awards, and a still-growing readership. It was also an international success and has translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. A sexy, poignant, funny tale about global meat and media production, My Year of Meats tells the story of Jane and Akiko, two women on opposite sides of the planet, whose lives are connected by a TV cooking show. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles.

Ozeki’s latest title, The Typing Lady, is a spirited and emotionally resonant collection with characters in every stage of life, from childhood to old age, and from coast to coast throughout the US. As these richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds unfold through tactile ephemera of writing—typewriters, letters, manuscripts, and disappearing ink—it’s revealed how we record ourselves in language, and how language, over time, records us in return.
Ozeki was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, by an American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University. During her years in Japan, she worked in Kyoto’s entertainment or “water” district as a bar hostess, studied flower arrangement as well as Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught in the English Department at Kyoto Sangyo University.

Ozeki returned to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low-budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world.

A frequent speaker on college and university campuses, Ozeki currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she lives with her husband, artist, Oliver Kellhammer. She currently teaches creative writing at Smith College, where she is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review and on the Creative Advisory Council of Hedgebrook. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in June 2010. 

For more information on Ruth Ozeki, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.

The Antoinette and Vincent M. Dungan Lectureship on Energy and the Environment was established in 2007. With the support of an endowed fund, the lectureship series brings a distinguish speaker to campus each year to address critical issues related to the environment from a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.