Haruna Shimizu is the community outreach fellow within PEN America’s membership and national engagement department. She recently graduated from Hamilton College with a double major in creative writing and French. She spent approximately half of her life living in Japan and the other half in the United States, cultivating her interest in celebrating different cultures through writing. In college, she studied abroad in Paris for one year, learning French art and literature. She was also a writing center tutor, a teaching assistant for Japanese literature and foreign languages, and a poetry editorial board member for the college’s literary magazine. She hopes to further explore her interests in storytelling and racial justice and pursue graduate studies in literature next fall.