Diana Morita Cole received the 2017 Richard Carver Award for Emerging Artists for her book, Sideways: Memoir of a Misfit, which tells of her birth behind barbed wires in a Minidoka incarceration site.
Cole grew up in a ghetto on the Near North Side of Chicago, where she was coddled by her 80-year-old grandfather, who carried her on his back through the city slums and taught her to swear using the cuss words he acquired while working for the railroad in Oregon. Her relationships with her much older siblings, tinged with cultural misunderstandings and generational dissonance, caused her to peer beneath the surface to find the meaning of their unhappiness.
Her creative nonfiction works have been included on the reading lists for the Japanese American Experience lecture series at the University of Hawai’i, the Creative Writing classes at Selkirk College, and the graduate social work program at San Francisco State University. She was awarded a grant from the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance in 2015.
Cole co-narrated the short documentary, Arigato, produced by the Nikkei Cultural Society of Lethbridge. The national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Pacific Citizen, has published her articles about the Japanese Canadian and the Japanese Latin American diaspora for its readership. She is also a contributor to Discover Nikkei.
Cole gave the keynote address for opening night of the KDocsFF Social Justice Film Festival in 2021. In the same year, she was a featured author at the LiterASIAN Festival. She is a principal storyteller for Nelson Storytelling Guild Festivals. Cole was invited by Robert Scheer to publish the article, "The Extraordinary Rendition of the Japanese Latin Americans During World War II" for ScheerPost.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/04/18/the-extraordinary-rendition-of-japanese-latin-americans-during-world-war-ii/
Cole is an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music at the University of Toronto and has served as the President of the Registered Music Teachers Association in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. She graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelors Degree in English Literature.
