with Jose Maria Sison entitled JMS: At Home in
the World, which has been hailed as a masterpiece.
This work traces the life of Jose Maria Sison and
his political standing as a revolutionary leader in
the Philippines. Her latest novel, Broken Arrow, is
scheduled to be released soon.
Rosca’s literary works generally focus on the
plight of the Filipino people and the effect of glo-
balization on the livelihood and culture of those
who live in the Third World. Her writings pay
particular attention to the lives of ordinary people
and how they manage to defend and develop their
humanity under difficult circumstances. She has
received numerous fellowships for fiction writing,
and she is the first Filipina to serve on the execu-
tive board of PEN America.
Ray ChandrasekaraRowland, Laura Joh (1954– )
Mystery writer Laura Joh Rowland, a descendant
of Korean and Chinese immigrants, was born and
raised in Harper Woods, Michigan. Her family’s
emphasis on education and achievement fostered
an early love of learning and a disciplined ap-
proach to academic success. She did not, however,
decide to become a writer until well into adult-
hood, after she worked as a scientist. Artistic,
ambitious, and expansively intelligent, Rowland
has produced 11 books in 12 years, featuring her
17th-century samurai detective Sano Ichiro, the
shogun’s “Most Honorable Investigator of Events,
Situations, and People.”
After earning a B.S. degree in microbiology and
a master’s degree in public health, both from the
University of Michigan, Rowland began her career
as a microbiologist and chemist, working for the
Environmental Protection Agency and in private
industry. She moved to New Orleans in 1981 with
her husband, Dr. Marty Rowland, a civil and en-
vironmental engineer, where she was a sanitary
inspector for the city. Her long career as a scien-
tist was largely spent at Lockheed Martin in New
Orleans, where she worked as a quality control
engineer on the NASA space shuttle’s fuel tank.
She describes the inception of her writing life as
a felicitous “accident.” Her scientific mind was
enriched and balanced by an interest in art and
design. She turned her hobby into a professional
opportunity and found work as a freelance illus-
trator. Writing was a by-product of her studious
approach to learning the children’s book trade:
She decided to create the text for her own illustra-
tions, took a writing class to hone her craft, and
ended up enjoying writing more than drawing.
Immersed in the cultural life of her city, Rowland
continues to study, “workshop” her books-in-
progress, and learn. She takes classes at the New
Orleans Academy of Fine Art and is a member
of several writing groups. She counts as a men-
tor and friend the late New Orleans–based sci-
ence fiction writer George Alec Effinger. Though
forced to leave the city for a time after Hurricane
Katrina in September 2005, Rowland and her hus-
band, like many other survivors, have returned to
remake their lives in New Orleans.
Rowland turned a serendipitous discovery of
talent and inclination into a lucrative and much-
loved full-time job. After completing a children’s
book as well as two novels for adults, she set out
to write compelling, marketable fiction with an
Asian cast of characters. Her deliberate choice of
genre and setting was born both of a reader’s pas-
sion and a canny reading of the publishing market.
She enjoyed detective fiction as a girl, particularly
the Nancy Drew series, and was schooled on the
classics: Agatha Christie, Mickey Spillane, Erle
Stanley Gardner. Asian-studies classes in college
and the films of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa
prompted an interest in Japanese art and history.
She is not a historian, but she is an assiduous
and meticulous researcher, with a keen eye for the
telling detail and a reader’s love of character and
story. In the overwhelmingly laudatory reviews of
her series, there have been some critical quibbles
about her occasional lapses in historical authen-
ticity (these, notably, center on the peculiarly
modern depiction of Sano Ichiro’s spirited and
independent wife, Reiko, his partner in detection),
but most succumb to the sweep and charm of her
literary resurrection of medieval Edo (Tokyo) with
its political intrigue, fascinating people and cus-
toms, and potential for violent crime. In his review254 Rowland, Laura Joh