On June 12, 2026, YKSP hosted a reception for Aisha Fukushima’s book of poetry, “Mostly Water” at the YKSP Residency Space in Harlem, NYC. This was a smaller, more intimate gathering compared to the reception held at Columbia University’s Butler Library a couple days earlier.

On June 10, 2026, we held a reading and reception to celebrate Aisha Fukushima’s new book, Mostly Water. Presented by the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project, in collaboration with the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML) at Columbia University.

Mostly Water is a poetry collection born from years of navigating social norms that fail to capture what it means to be mixed. Drawing on her lived experiences as a Black and Japanese person growing up between the U.S. and Japan, Aisha Fukushima explores what it means to live from mixed roots. Moving through her grandmother’s kitchen, hair salons, and post-WWII Afro-Japanese histories, Fukushima challenges narrow frameworks around racial belonging. Here, abundance replace the racialized math of halves and quarters. From micro-aggressions to quiet prayers, each stanza is a lyric within a larger freedom song.

These poems are an opening — an offering for anyone who has ever searched for language spacious enough to hold who they truly are. We are, after all, mostly water — fluid, uncontainable, beyond measure.

Aisha Fukushima was the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project's (YKSP) first Artist in Residence in May 2025. Honoring Yuri Kochiyama's praxis of 'radical hospitality' and her legacy of providing people and communities with space and accommodations in her Harlem home, the YKSP Residency Program carries that spirit forward supporting artists, scholars and organizers in a dedicated Central Harlem space. We’re excited to support the culmination of her residency and work in the publication of Mostly Water this June.