Marnie Mueller

I was born in the Tule Lake Japanese American High Security camp in Northern California during WWII to Caucasian parents who had gone there to work to try to make a terrible situation tolerable for the people incarcerated there.

In 1963, I answered President Kennedy's call to "ask not what you country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." The very day I entered the Peace Corps was the day he was assassinated. I spent two years in Guayaquil, Ecuador living and working in an urban barrio. When I returned to the United States I worked as a community organizer in Spanish Harlem in New York City. I later produced rock and folk concerts and city-wide festivals, and served as the Program Director of WBAI-FM an alternative radio station in New York City.

In the 1980s, I began to write and published many short stories, essays, and poems in literary magazines, anthologies, and commercial venues. And in 1994, I published my first novel, GREEN FIRES, set in the rain forest of Ecuador, which drew on some of my Peace Corps experience, as well as documented the first incursions of oil companies into the region.

My second novel, THE CLIMATE OF THE COUNTRY, is set in the Tule Lake Camp and is loosely based on my parents' experiences working there.

MY MOTHER'S ISLAND, my third book, takes place in a small working class community in Puerto Rico. Though a novel, it closely follows the real story of my mother's death there and how the neighbors came in to help me help her to die.

I've been fortunate in that my novels have garnered many awards and notices. Anyone interested in learning more can go to my website at marniemueller.com.

I'm currently working on a non-fiction book about my relationship with a Japanese American showgirl who was interned in Minidoka Camp in Idaho during World War II.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City with my husband, Fritz Mueller.