Her mother's family owns a Buddhist temple in Tōhoku Japan, 25 miles from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power reactor.
[2] Mockett graduated from the Robert Louis Stevenson School in Pebble Beach, California [3] and Columbia University in 1992.
An op-ed published in The New York Times about the effects of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan ultimately led to the publication of Mockett's memoir, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye,[5] which was shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Northern California Book Award.
[17] This contemporary post-pandemic novel was a most-anticipated book according to The Washington Post[18] and Oprah[19] and features a coming of middle age heroine who reinvents herself, through an affair with a mysterious arborist, against the backdrop of the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji.
[25] With Kiese Laymon, she is also a series editor of the new nonfiction imprint, Great Circle Books, published by University of North Carolina Press.