The MidWest Mixed Community Spotlight Series features local artists, educators, and leaders reflecting on their Mixed or Transracial identities.
Sherry Quan Lee
Author of Chinese Black Bird, How to Write a Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman’s life, Love Imagined: a mixed raced memoir (Minnesota Book Award Finalist); and editor How Dare We Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse; forthcoming 2019 And You Can Love Me: a story for everyone who loves someone with ASD-all LHP/Modern History publications.
Oh So Wild and Oh So Beautiful
I am Sherry Quan Lee, formerly known, in my 30s, as A Little Mixed Up which is also the title of my book of poems published in 1982. Today I am 70 years old and still writing about my mixed-race identity. I believe identity is defined by intersectionality and is ever changing. In other words, who I am is more than race (which is a social construct). It is culture: family, home, environment, education, economics, gender, sexuality-oh so many things. I don’t like labels because labels confine us. Perhaps that is why I write. Narrative offers discovery for both the writer and the reader. Narrative allows more than a singular perspective. Instead it relies on descriptive detail and introspection.
