MEDIA RELEASE

Award-winning author Garrett Hongo and Capt. Charles Moore, founder and research coordinator of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, will read from and discuss their latest books in two separate presentations at Hawaii Preparatory Academy.

Garrett Hongo

Both authors will be available to sign their books at the respective events, which are free and open to the public.

Hongo will read from his newest book of poems, “Coral Road,” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, at the HPA Dyer Memorial Library, located at the Upper Campus.

Coral Road, Hongo’s long-awaited third collection of poems, explores the history of the impermanent homeland his ancestors found on the island of Oahu after their immigration from southern Japan, and meditates on the dramatic tales of the islands.

Hongo takes up strands of family stories and what he calls “a long legacy of silence” about their experience as contract laborers along the North Shore of the island. The love of art — making beauty in however provisional a culture — has clearly been a guiding principle in Hongo’s poetry.

In this content-rich verse, Hongo hearkens to and delivers “the luminous and the anecdotal,” bringing forth a complete aesthetic experience from the shards that make up a life.

Hongo, who was born in Volcano and lived as a child in Kahuku on Oahu, grew up in Los Angeles.

He is the author of two previous collections of poetry (Yellow Light, The River of Heaven), three anthologies, and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii.

His poems and essays have appeared in such publications as The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

He is the recipient of several awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Hongo lives in Eugene, Ore. and teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Capt. Charles Moore

Capt. Charles Moore will discuss his new book, “Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain’s Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans,” at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, at HPA’s Energy Lab, located at the Upper Campus.

Plastic Ocean tells how Moore returns to an area known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which he first encountered in 1997 after a trans-Pacific sailing race, and culls scientific samples with a game, but mostly neophyte crew.

The results are shocking — plastic caught in his nets outweigh zooplankton, the ocean’s food base, by a factor of six to one. His research prompts a massive global reassessment of plastics’ invasiveness and raises profound questions about the implications of this man-made floating landfill.

Moore’s initial voyage, his subsequent trips back, his research into this startling discovery, his hard-won scientific credibility, and his dogged, game-changing efforts to get the world to pay attention to a looming plastic peril, are chronicled in Plastic Ocean.

Moore, who grew up in and on the Pacific Ocean, is a third generation resident of Long Beach, Calif. His father was an industrial chemist and avid sailor who took the young Moore and his siblings sailing to remote destinations from Guadalupe Island to Hawaii.

Moore founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation in 1994. He and his oceanographic research vessel, Alguita, found their true calling after a 1997 yacht race to Hawaii when on his return voyage, Moore saw an ocean he had never known.

“Every time I came on deck to survey the horizon, I saw a soap bottle, bottle cap, or a shard of plastic waste bobbing by. Here I was in the middle of the ocean and there was nowhere I could go to avoid the plastic.”

Ever since, Moore has dedicated his time and resources to understanding and remediating the ocean’s plastic load. Along with collaborators from the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, he developed protocols for monitoring marine and beach micro-plastics that are now used worldwide.

To date, Moore has conducted ocean and coastal sampling for plastic fragments through more than 40,000 miles of the North Pacific Ocean.

For more information, call 881-4099.