Frank Abe

FRANK ABE is lead author of the graphic novel, "WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration" (Chin Music Press, 2021), named a Finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Washington State Book Award. He wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning PBS documentary, "Conscience and the Constitution," on the largest organized resistance to the camps. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of "JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy" (University of Washington Press, 2018), in which he authored the first-ever biography of Okada and traced the origins of his novel. He is currently co-editing "The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration" with Floyd Cheung for Penguin Classics, set for May 2024. Abe helped produce the first-ever Day of Remembrance in Seattle in 1978 with Frank Chin and Lawson Inada, and together they invented a new Japanese American tradition to reclaim the history of wartime imprisonment and publicly dramatize the campaign for redress. He was an original member of Chin’s Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco and studied at the American Conservatory Theater.