Micah Tasaka

Micah Tasaka (田坂舞花) is a queer, nonbinary, mixed Japanese poet, artist, community organizer, Reiki practitioner, and magic maker from Colton, California. Micah has led healing and writing workshops for trauma survivors and queer and trans* people of color. Working with a variety of mediums including dance, visual art, music, meditation, and writing, they believe that art and performance hold the keys to survival and radical healing both on a community and personal level. Currently, they reside in Riverside, California, and work as a teaching artist for Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance. They received their undergraduate degree in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. Their first full length manuscript, Expansions, was released on Jamii Publishing in 2017.

You can find more of Micah’s work at www.micahtasaka.com or @kinokono_inaka on Instagram.

Micah’s project, submitted to the “Contested and Re-visited Spaces and Sites” roundtable, is entitled Renaming Ourselves: Exploring Colton’s Jap Hill. Their YouTube video below explores existential and subjective questions, specifically examining how the process of naming allow us to control the narratives about our people and our locations.

This project focuses on the ways that naming is often disconnected from historical truth while attempting to re-create the names given to us and tell our own stories.