May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month! To help bookstores and libraries celebrate, we’ve put together this roundup of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to spotlight all month and year-round. (We publish longer reading lists each month as well—check out our most recent reading list for Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month for more books to feature!)
Poetry
Seer by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press | December 15, 2024
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN 978-1-934909-81-2
Seer is a “multi-lingual, multi-coastal, multi-dimensional poetic record of a time in our collective history when our potential human demise loomed large.”
Karaoke at the End of the World by Genevieve DeGuzman
JackLeg Press | March 16, 2026
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1956907247
DeGuzman’s poetry collection “takes readers on an intergalactic journey through the multiverse.”
All Empires Must by Mia Kang
Airlie Press | April 15, 2025
Distributor: Asterism Books
ISBN: 978-1-950404-16-2
According to Maggie Millner, this poetry collection “ponders and parses the Roman Empire—with its walls and conquests, artworks and origin myths—sifting the ruins for clues as to how to live, grieve, and speak in the present.”
Antibody by Elane Kim
River River Books | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-0-1
“Meditating on acts of care, science, light, translation, girlhood, and Korean-American identity,” Kim’s poetry acts as “a safeguard against forgetting, a hedge against devastation.”
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin
Alice James Books | March 11, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781949944709
Lin’s collection speaks of “the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself.”
Primordial by Mai Der Vang
Graywolf Press | March 4, 2025
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1-64445-326-1
Vang’s newest collection “examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival.”
We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word
Haymarket Books | September 17, 2024
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9798888900871
This intergenerational anthology features poets who “challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label ‘Asian American and Pacific Islander’ in today’s world.”
Fiction
Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Santa Fe Writers Project | November 4, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781951631512
These stories “of resilience offer readers a glimpse behind the bird-of-paradise curtains and a look at what’s not in the travel magazines.”
The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later
Three Rooms Press | March 25, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-953103-57-4
Featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Lam, Barbara Tran, Vi Khi Nao, and more, this short fiction collection “speaks to the global Vietnamese experience: voices of both those who left and those who stayed, what was gained and lost” in the half century since the Vietnam War.
Sidework by Sasha Hom
Black Lawrence Press | March 18, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9781625571564
Hom’s novella “takes place during a Sunday breakfast shift as the homeless hero waits tables at a popular ‘Cash Only’ diner tucked in the Redwoods, frequented by growers, rock stars, Dreamers, tycoons, and tourists alike.”
Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam
Red Hen Press | March 25, 2025
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 9781636282428
The fourteen stories in this collection “explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California.”
Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa
Deep Vellum | March 4, 2025
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781646053568
This novel-in-verse “tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century.”
Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Kaya Press | June 10, 2025
Distributor: Distributed Art Publishers
ISBN: 9781935717010
Kaya’s new edition of this acclaimed novel, originally published in 1997, “includes an interview with Yamanaka about her career and the controversies surrounding this novel, along with a contextualizing afterword by Asian American scholar Khuê Ninh.”
Nonfiction
The Boat Not Taken by Joanna Choi Kalbus
WTAW Press | May 6, 2025
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9798987719794
This “lyrical, often humorous” memoir is “a love letter to an extraordinary woman: an independent widow fiercely devoted yet destructively deceptive to her child.”
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin
Dorothy, a publishing project | September 30, 2025
Distributor: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 978-1-948980-29-6
In this book, Lin resurrects Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas “to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.”
Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi
Trio House Press | October 1, 2025
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 9781949487480
In these personal essays, as Najmi “navigates the process of forging her identity as a professor and mother, her extended family inspires, haunts, and stirs her to action.”
