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Forced Out wins the 2022 Evans Handcart Award!

August 18, 2022

Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America, by Judy Y. Kawamoto is the winner the 2022 Evans Handcart Award.

This year’s Evans Awards, administered by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University, went to authors whose selected works focused on themes of religious and cultural history in the American West. Administered by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University. These prizes recognize the best of research and writing in biographies, autobiographies and memoirs that focus on the stories of people who have shaped the character of the Interior West. 

Forced Out recounts Kawamoto’s experience moving west from Washington state under “voluntary evacuation,” a brief World War II-era program that urged Japanese Americans to leave the West Coast for inland areas before forced evacuation and interment was enacted. “Forced Out“ earned this year’s Handcart Award, with one juror on the regional committee noting, “Her story sheds light on an unknown and understudied experience in Western history and draws important attention to the experiences of Asian Americans in the West.”

Click here for more detail and information on the 2022 Evans Biography and Handcart Awards and the winner of this year's Biography award.



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