One book by a writer from the Marshall Islands, set there, that gives a real sense of the place: Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.
The Marshall Islands' best-known writer abroad is the poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, who read a poem to world leaders at the United Nations climate summit in 2014. Marshallese stories and songs were long carried by voice rather than print, and writing arrived with missionaries in the nineteenth century. With a small population on scattered coral atolls, few books by Marshallese authors have reached English readers, and many books about the islands are by outsiders.
Jetñil-Kijiner's Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter looks at nuclear testing, rising seas and family. Jack Niedenthal's For the Good of Mankind: A History of the People of Bikini and Their Islands tells of the Bikinians' removal from their atoll and their long fight for compensation. Giff Johnson's Don't Ever Whisper profiles the health activist Darlene Keju, whose work took her to Majuro and Ebeye.
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Poems by a Marshallese writer on nuclear testing legacies, climate threat to low-lying atolls, migration, family and Marshallese identity.
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