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"Losing Don Belton: Meditations on Friendship, Murder, Race, and the Ethics..

For some years I have been writing the story of my friend Don Belton, a gay black novelist, essayist, and gender theorist who was murdered in a homophobic hate crime by a white Marine veteran. Life writing leads to a number of ethics questions—regarding privacy, honesty and completeness, perspective and fairness, and so on. This talk explores the special ethical responsibilities of authors that are raised by hate crimes and murder, particularly regarding just whom we are responsible to.

Mara Miller, a Visiting Scholar for 2017–18 with the Center for Biographical Research, is completing a book, Losing Don Belton: Meditations on Friendship, Murder, and Race, about the murder of her close friend and its implications for all of us. Mara is a philosopher, Asian art and literature specialist, artist, and the author of The Garden as an Art and six dozen publications on selfhood, women’s and gender studies, literature, and the atomic bombings and nuclear weapons. She teaches Japanese literature for the 51���-Mānoa East Asian Languages and Literatures Department, and will teach Modern Japanese Literature as an Ethics Focus and Writing Intensive course on women writers this summer.

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Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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