'Jet Black and the Ninja Wind,' a YA adventure I co-wrote with my Japanese husband, is about a biracial girl seeking home across cultures.

Its about creating connection and family-finding a home in each other, and in the world. My memoir, 'In Search of the Sun' charts my quest for motherhood across two decades, two continents, and two thousand yoga poses. It's about making a home within yourself when the only home you've ever known is destroyed. 'Up from the Sea,' my debut Young Adult novel in verse about the MaJapan tsunami, is just out from Crown Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House. How is culture shaped, and how are we shaped by it? All of my books deal with notions of finding home. I’m interested in ideas of identity and history. For over two decades, I've been charting my quest in twenty books in many genres. I'm a California girl living in Tokyo, where I write and run a yoga studio. Her debut YA novel, Jet Black and the Ninja Wind, won the 2013–2014 Asian/Pacific American Award in Young Adult Literature. She travels throughout Japan and Asia to teach yoga and write. She has edited and published over seventeen books, many on Japan, and has run her own yoga studio in Tokyo for a decade. Leza Lowitz lives in Tokyo with her husband, the writer Shogo Oketani, and their ten-year-old son. Through teaching, meditation, and community, she transcends her struggles and embraces the joys of adoption and motherhood.

This inspiring memoir reflects the author's deep connection to yoga that allows her to realize that infertile does not mean inconceivable. Something is still not complete until she learns that when you give a little love to a child, you get the whole world in return. She travels to India to work on herself and back to California to deal with her past. Then, at forty-four, Leza and her Japanese husband seek to adopt-in a country where bloodlines are paramount and family ties are almost feudal in their cultural importance. Rather than struggle to fit in, she opens a yoga studio and makes a home for others. But she's still an outsider, and home is far away. When Leza moves to Japan and meets the man of her dreams, her heart opens in ways she never thought possible. Coming of age in Berkeley, California, during the sexual and feminist revolutions of the 1970s, she learned that marriage and family could wait. At thirty, Californian Leza Lowitz is single and traveling the world, which suits her just fine.

In Search of the Sun by Leza Lowitz