Lena Newlin papers, 2023-2024

Lena Newlin was a writer and public health professional in the state of Wyoming. She was a fourth-generation Wyoming resident with family roots in both the Japanese American community incarcerated at Heart Mountain during World War II and among Wyoming’s railroad and coal mining laborers. She earned a Master's of Public Health from Oregon State University and later left a 22-year career in the field to pursue a Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming in 2022. She wrote creative nonfiction and hybrid genre storytelling. Her writing appeared in outlets including The New York Times, Solstice Literary Magazine, and High Desert Journal, and was recognized with a Pushcart Prize nomination and as a finalist for the Porch Prize. In 2024, she began a PhD in Public Humanities at the University of Wyoming. Her research interests included Japanese American and Japanese Peruvian histories of immigration, assimilation, WWII incarceration, military service, and resistance.