Joanne Oppenheim
Joanne Oppenheim’s Dear Miss Breed, True stories of the Japanese American Incarceration and a Librarian Who Made a Difference, won the Carter G. WoodsonAward and NYTimes Best for Teen Age List;her Knish War on Rivington Street is the winner of the Sydney Taylor Notable Book Award and the 2018 GANYC Apple Award. Her book Have You Seen Birds? was awarded the Canada Council Children’s Literature Prize. She has written more than 50 books for children, young adults and adults, including Stanley Hayami, Nisei Son. She is president of Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, a review of children’s products, as well as a contributor to NBC’s “Today Show.”
Updated April 2022
Stories from This Author
Unforgotten Voices—Heart Mountain Holidays
Dec. 25, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
The following are holiday-themed excerpts from our book, Unforgotten Voices: An Oral History of the Incarceration, a collection of first-person accounts culled from original interviews, diaries, letters, and archival research. Together, they tell the story of the U.S. government concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming between the years of 1941 and 1945. They reflect the surreal quality of celebrating Christmas behind barbed wire: receiving gifts from anonymous church donors, the longing to return to the west coast, and the sense …
An excerpt from Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain: As American As Apple Pie—Yellowstone - Part 2
May 2, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
Read Part 1 >> BACON, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENT We boy scouts went camping at the river and had a lot of good times. But there was one time I will never forget...we saw a patch of watermelons. One boy had a pocketknife, so we plugged melons trying to find some ripe ones. The next day, there was a bulletin put out by the camp newspaper reporting the incident and were we scared. We had damaged food for our own use. …
An excerpt from Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain: As American As Apple Pie—Yellowstone - Part 1
May 1, 2023 • Joanne Oppenheim , Nancy Matsumoto
Unforgotten Voices From Heart Mountain: An Oral History of the Incarceration* is different from the usual memoir or biography of an individual family and it’s different from a historian’s narrative about the Incarceration and how it happened. These are unforgettable voices of Japanese Americans, many of them young people who were imprisoned during WWII, as well as those who imprisoned them, and townspeople in the harsh high desert of Wyoming. Told in their own words, from interviews, diaries, and letters these …
