Mako NakagawaIn February 2018, Mako Nakagawa celebrated her 81st birthday and completed her memoir, Child Prisoner in American Prison Camps, which she had been working on for more than a decade. This book is based on her original manuscript of stories for young raders, Camp Child, self-published in 2007. Her brother-in-law, Mits Katayama, a well-established commercial artist, created original illustrations to accompany Mako's stories. Mako began her formal education at five years old as a child prisoner in American concentration camps built to confine people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast during World War II. In her adult years, Mako became an educator, earning her M.A. in Education from Seattle University. She specialized in multicultural education and was the Program Director for Seattle Public School's Ethnic Cultural Heritage Program (RAINBOW). In 1976, she oversaw development of a RAINBOW curriculum for a national market and received a Washington Education Association Curriculum Award in 1977 for her work on this project. Mako served as principal at two Seattle elementary schools in the 1970s and 1980s. She went on to become Program Administrator for Multicultural Education, Basic Skills and the Curriculum unit of the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI). Her growing concern for Japanese American civil rights and redress matched her ongoing concern for multicultural education. In 1991, Mako started her own business, Mako & Associates, providing contract diversity training programs. As an accomplished public speaker and writer, Mako emphasized the "power of words" and the importance of describing the imprisonment of Japanese Americans with accurate terminology - not with euphemisms that mislead and distort the truth. Mako was an active member of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and other groups to create policies and plans to educate the general public about the injustices in recent U.S. history, in particular, the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Over the years she has made numerous presentations on her experiences as a child prisoner and conducted a series of workshops on the subject for teachers, organizations, and students from elementary through college. Mako has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors for her work as an educator, including from the national Committee on School Desegregation, the Asian Education Advisory Council, and the Japanese American Citizens League. Mako lives in Seattle and has three adult children. She enjoys Seattle sports including the Seahawks, Sounders, and Mariners, and spending time with her family and friends. This is her first published book and if you ask her --her last! Read More Read Less