FRANK ABE is lead author of a 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 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 co-editor of a new anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, from Penguin Classics.
Abe wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution on the largest organized resistance in the camps, and with writer Frank Chin helped organize the first-ever “Day of Remembrance” in Seattle in 1978. He was an original member of Chin’s Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco and studied at the American Conservatory Theater.