For Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, observed annually during the month of May, we asked our member presses and literary magazines to share some of the literature by Asian American and Pacific Islander American writers they recommend reading in celebration.
Poetry Collections
The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali
Alice James Books | 2020
According to Sherif Abdelkarim, “In Ali’s variation, culture and theology collapse to find God—often inexplicably lowercased—in profane spaces, far away from the purity of the temple, closer than ever to that farthest mosque within.”
The Migrant States by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press | 2020
According to Ilya Kaminsky, this is a book “where passion and memory meet, a book that calls for open borders of the mind, it is a book that knows that everyone and no one is a foreigner on this planet and that the country of the poets has no customs.”
Deep Are These Distances Between Us by Susan Atefat-Peckham
CavanKerry Press | 2023
Edited by Darius Atefat-Peckham, this collection “troubles preconceptions of nationhood and fixed systems of power by bringing her reader into the home and offering twilit glimpses of boundless familial love and intimacy.”
Tender Machines by J. Mae Barizo
Tupelo Press | 2023
Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, these poems “swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance.”
Alice James Books | 2023
According to Hilary Sun, this collection “reminds us that we can break this cycle of bitterness and transform it into beautiful, imagined futures. To be eaten does not have to be othering; it can be a way of knowing and understanding.”
Sarabande Books | 2020
In this debut poetry collection, Chan “navigates her Filipino heritage by grappling with notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery.”
Kelsey Street Press | 2017
Chen’s recombinant is “a work of material critique, philosophically jarring in its use of syntax, sound, the erasures held in the stillness of its whitespace that again and again mimic a historical registry.”
The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen
Black Square Editions | 2022
According to Sawako Nakayasu, Fagen’s collection is “a complex animal—crouching, questioning, restless, at times stalking the edges of consciousness, at times wild of mouth, with an electric charged bite.”
Love Letters to the World by Meia Geddes
Poetose | 2016
According to Jennifer Tseng, Geddes’ lyrical letters “are like paper cranes she has made to save someone. To read them is to touch a bird in flight, to experience a growing proximity to possibility as it flies toward you.”
Each Crumbling House by Melody S. Gee
Perugia Press | 2010
In Each Crumbling House, Gee “asks about inheriting a language that isn’t hers and a culture that died during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, while she tangles with the loss of her mother’s culture, food, history, and home.”
North of Order by Nicholas Gulig
YesYes Books | 2015
According to Graham Foust, this debut collection is “a book-length poem concerned with the locality of what is lost.”
The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani
Perugia Press | 2023
This debut collection, “conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth.”
Acre Books | 2022
In her third poetry collection, Le “sheds light on the experience of being the daughter of Vietnamese refugees in today’s sometimes tense and hostile America.”
Rose Is a Verb: Neo-Georgics by Karen An-Hwei Lee
Slant Books | 2021
In this collection Lee, “inspired by Virgil, has created her own dense, richly-layered collection of ‘Neo-Georgics,’ constituting an extended exploration of such motifs as happiness, olive groves, vineyards, soil chemistries, the seacoast, and the birth of trees.”
Cutting Time with a Knife by Michael Leong
Black Square Editions | 2012
According to Andrew Joron, Leong “redefines the space-time of the page as a furnace of pure imagination, where the cadaver of modernist poetics is smelted with black humor.”
How To Become the God of Small Things by Fiona Lu
Map Literary | 2023
In this debut chapbook, Lu “vividly extracts the storms of familial relationships and weaves them into a work filled with feminine strengths, landscapes of fragility, and humanized gods.”
Graywolf Press | 2019
This collection “explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology.”
Dialect of Distant Harbors by Dipika Mukherjee
CavanKerry Press | 2022
These poems are “incantations to our connections to the human family—whether in Asia, or Europe, or the United States—and focus on what is most resilient in ourselves and our communities.”
Tupelo Press | 2021
According to Campbell McGrath, Nakanishi’s debut poetry collection is “a document of lyrical witness steeped in the language, history and mythology of her native Hawaii.”
Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Tupelo Press | 2011
Nezhukumatathil’s third collection “travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, ‘new hope,’ and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves.”
Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu
Host Publications | 2024
This chapbook “animates extinct, endangered, and recovering species of Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory, through visual poems that chronicle the extinction crisis without relenting to its abstraction.”
From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot] by Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn | 2023
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry, this book “explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders.”
Airlie Press | 2020
Perrine’s fourth collection “riffs on common words—tremendous, terrific, disaster, wall, ban—that have been overused and misused in recent years, made to carry the weight of disturbing connotations.”
My Boyfriend Apocalypse by antmen pimentel mendoza
Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2023
According to Sanjana Bijlani, “the speculative tenderness at the heart of antmen pimentel mendoza’s poetry embraces life, not just survival, while the future is still ours to imagine.”
YesYes Books | 2017
This collection “dissects experiences against a white Southern background and begs the question: ‘What does America demand of my brown body?’”
Happy Poems and Other Lies by Jeddie Sophronius
Codhill Press | 2024
Sophronius’s fourth book combines “elements of biblical language, surrealism, and absurdism to explore the speaker’s longing for acceptance and their internal conflicts as they navigate their own spirituality.”
Fonograf Editions | 2020
Published alongside a companion album, Strom’s collection “is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of ‘voice.’”
What You Refuse To Remember by MT Vallarta
Small Harbor Publishing | 2023
According to Angela Peñaredondo, this debut collection “transgresses narratives of second-generation immigrant g[x]rlhood by intimately positioning it against cultural histories of imperialism, gender violence, and femme subjugation.”
Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle
Fonograf Editions | 2021
This debut collection focuses “on immigration, colonialism, and the death of the speaker’s infant daughter.”
Graywolf Press | 2021
A finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, this poetry collection is “a reinvestigation of chemical biological weapons dropped on the Hmong people in the fallout of the Vietnam War.”
My Name Is Immigrant by Wang Ping
Hanging Loose Press | 2021
Wang’s latest poetry collection is a “song for the plight and pride of immigrants around the globe.”
Omnidawn | 2023
In this collection made up of eight sections, Yau “summons spirits who help the author ‘tell all the truth,’ among whom are reimagined traces of poets, movie stars, and science fiction writers.”
Airlie Press | 2024
Told in three parts, this book interrogates “how our environments are imagined, constructed, represented, and lived in.”
Plays, Graphic Narratives & Hybrid Works
Northwood Meadows: Moments by Andy Chang
Read Furiously | 2024
This book uses the three-panel style of the classic comic strip and a crew of woodland creatures to celebrate “the beauty of sequential art and the joy it brings to readers.”
Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho
Feminist Press | 2021
Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, this book is “about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia.”
Read Furiously | 2023
In a series of vignettes, Cruz “chronicles her pregnancy and all of its unexpected firsts” and “offers a beautiful celebration of her family’s Filipino heritage and her loving network of family and friends.”
53rd State Press | 2019
Written to be performed by a Japanese heritage cast, in this bilingual play “a salaryman searches for self-worth, while a lonely teenage girl grapples with her sexuality in a nightmarish, male-defined society.”
Navigating the Divide by Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Alan Squire Publishing | 2019
This multi-genre collection “sets out to attempt its namesake, to ‘navigate the divide’—between spiritual and physical, between thought and desire, between individual and collective.”
Burrow Press | 2024
A “literary-architectural hybrid project,” this book “sketches fault lines within a Filipinx family, linking intimate harm to the forces of colonialism and labor migration.”
Vine Leaves Press | 2024
In this story, “an elderly Korean woman relives her years upended by the Korean War, finding love in the rubble, and her acclimation to 1960s America.”
Black Lawrence Press | 2022
According to Erin Belieu, this collection about family, heritage, and the construction of nonbinary and queer identities “demonstrates the great pleasures and opportunities for surprise there are in hybrid forms.”
Novels & Short Fiction Collections
The City of Good Death by Priyanka Champaneri
Restless Books | 2021
Champaneri’s debut novel “brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.”
All Roads Lead to Blood by Bonnie Chau
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2018
These stories exploring the lives of young women are “bold, highly imaginative, and haunting, featuring unique characters who defiantly exert their individuality.”
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2020
According to Helen Benedict, this is “a fast-paced, sexy novel about growing up, making mistakes, and learning from them, written in a defiant, witty prose.”
Ship of Fates by Caitlin Chung
Lanternfish Press | 2020
“This gem of a novel,” writes Lewis Buzbee, “is a dazzling, subversive fairy tale, one that both reveals and upends the myth of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.”
Salve by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Nomadic Press & Black Lawrence Press | 2016
According to Michelle Tea, this story collection contains “intimate, gutsy, heartbreaking stories—stories about having bodies and having histories, having desire and having had desire.”
The Parted Earth by Anjali Enjeti
Hub City Press | 2021
Enjeti’s debut novel “is a heartfelt and human portrait of the long shadow of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent on the lives of three generations.”
The Default World by Naomi Kanakia
Feminist Press | 2024
Kanakia’s novel “skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture and asks whether ‘found family’ is just another of the twenty-first century’s broken promises.”
Maw Appears in the Following Forms by Kiley McLaughlin
Gold Line Press | 2024
In linked vignettes, McLaughlin “experiments with speculative storytelling, queer myth-making, and decolonial horror to ask what it means to inhabit a body and lineage fractured by multiple intersecting histories of violence.”
The Hundred Choices Department Store by Ginger Park
Regal House Publishing | 2022
According to Karen Leggett Abouraya, this middle-grade novel set in northern Korea during World War II is “a reminder that losses from conflict have a lasting impact, even on resilient children, and political boundaries often draw red lines through the heart.”
The Hour of Daydreams by Renee Macalino Rutledge
Forest Avenue Press | 2017
This debut novel, according to Daisy Hernández, “is a stirring and haunting exploration of marriage, culture, and gender roles.”
The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore by Jasmine Sawers
Rose Metal Press | 2022
Drawing inspiration from a mixed heritage and from history, this collection “invents a hybrid folklore for liminal characters who live between the lines and within the creases of race and language, culture and gender, sexuality and ability.”
Voyager 2, This is Voyager 1, Over by Maxwell Suzuki
Gold Line Press | 2024
Over the course of three stories, Suzuki “navigates the tensions and freedoms of isolation, retreat, seclusion, and self discovery.”
A Professional Lola by E. P. Tuazon
Red Hen Press | 2024
Winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, this collection blends “literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity.”
Mongolian Horse by David E. Yee
Black Lawrence Press | 2022
According to Lee Martin, these “are unforgettable stories of the ways we fail one another despite our best intentions and the spirit it takes to keep believing in redemption.”
Nonfiction Books
Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time by Natalie Hodges
Bellevue Literary Press | 2022
Concert solo violinist Hodges “traces her own passage through difficult family dynamics, prejudice, and enormous personal expectations to come to terms with the meaning of a life reimagined.”
Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Graywolf Press | 2021
In this collection, Myint “explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived” and “intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar.”
Milkweed Editions | 2024
Nezhukumatathil’s celebrated work of nonfiction now includes additional essays and illustrations.
The Face: A Time Code by Ruth Ozeki
Restless Books | 2016
In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki “challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail.”
A Fish Growing Lungs by Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
Burrow Press | 2020
These linked essays “reflect on Sawchyn’s diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present.”
A Daughter of the Samurai by Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
Warbler Press | 2021
In this memoir, Sugimoto “chronicles her childhood in the frozen Nagaoka region of Japan,” as well as her eventual move to the United States after “she becomes engaged by family arrangement to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati, Ohio.”
Anthologies
Hub City Press | 2020
Edited by Cinelle Barnes, the essays in this anthology—by Jennifer Hope Choi, M. Evelina Galang, Aruni Kashyap, and more—“confront the complexities of the South’s relationship with race, uncovering the particular difficulties and profound joys of being a Southerner in the 21st century.”
Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts
Warbler Press | 2020
Edited by Ulrich Baer and Smaran Dayal, this anthology brings together some of the first published works from Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Yone Noguchi, and Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton).
Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets
Kelsey Street Press | 2015
In this anthology edited by Timothy Yu and Emgee Dufresne, four essayists “provide a critical framework on the life, works, politics, and poetics of Asian American poets Nellie Wong, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Bhanu Kapil.”
Literary Magazines
“The Umbilical Telephone” by K-Ming Chang
ANMLY | 2023
This piece begins, “In our house we have a big beige telephone, absorbent as a loaf of bread. It turns stale when we’re silent, so we talk as much as possible.”
“Self Portrait as Fraying Seams” by Ava Chen
manywor(l)ds | 2023
This poem begins, “I was born at 11:11 a.m. though / I didn’t believe my mother / for too little time.”
“After After” by Uyen Phuong Dang
The Cincinnati Review | 2023
This story begins, “The Reforms came to Vietnam and all the birds started to vanish.”
The Kenyon Review | 2024
This poem begins, “A good way to change your / name is to get a divorce.”
“The Kanzaki River” by Yuko Iida Frost
Apple Valley Review | 2022
This essay begins, “Our street in Osaka was still unpaved. The dust stirred up when the donkey strolled past, wheeling its three-layered glass case, displaying freshly baked bread….”
“Grocery Store Lockdown” by Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga
The Fabulist | 2021
This poem begins, “What / Is today? / Does it matter?”
Another Chicago Magazine | 2023
This story begins, “Faria’s worst doubts were confirmed the moment her grandmother took out the sarota to slice some particularly large suparis.”
“Please Be Patient, Student Driver” by Joseph Han
The Sun | 2023
This story begins, “My classmates were all getting their driver’s licenses. Like any of us had anywhere important to go. They drove cars their parents had gifted them, either a hand-me-down or a brand-new lease.”
manywor(l)ds | 2023
This poem begins, “My poems are dysphoric. My poems are weeping about shape. I’m sorry. You wish a poem had hips. / You wish a poem whipped itself natural and narrow…”
Exposition Review | 2023
This story begins, “I missed my sixth-grade graduation because I had to go with my parents to Seoul to stay in a multistory hotel. The mission was to scoop up a child we had never seen before, sign some papers, and call her ours.”
“Dreaming of Potatoes” by Toshiya Kamei
The Fabulist | 2023
This story begins, “When the world ended twenty-four years ago we had enjoyed scoops of ice cream after dinner—until our freezer died.”
Midway Journal | 2015
This poem begins, “Hauled off / harried by raw earth, / holy, / wounded, / disrobed, both / him and her hard-pressed….”
“The Hudson River School of Painters” by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
The Hudson Review | 2023
This poem begins, “is American identity, I was told. / Never saw why, until that morning / at the Met. Catskills, the green-bodied / and lively river, twining….”
The Cincinnati Review | 2023
This poem begins, “I roam the aisles at the fancy food store, / through isles of citrus and berries and grapes, / my mouth a desert, desirous of shapes….”
“in ache” by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
SmokeLong Quarterly | 2022
This story begins, “she shuffles in flea market slippers too big for her flat walk-on-lava feet you going grow into dem no worries she veils her tears in a hand-me-down….”
“In the Morning, I Hear Singing…” by Lio Min
Exposition Review | 2023
This story begins, “Yoona doesn’t scare easily. But when she spots Marisol sitting under the flickering halo of the block’s lone streetlamp, she gasps.”
“Mother Warns Us of Men” by Shareen K. Murayama
SmokeLong Quarterly | 2022
This story begins, “Like the sun, Father disappears every day after work, after drinking too much awamori. He hurricanes other spirits with spirits.”
Wellspringwords | 2024
This essay begins, “In the dream, I’m having dinner on a terrace overlooking the garden of my Airbnb, a white building with a clay-tiled roof.”
“Towards Zero” by Mandira Pattnaik
The ASP Bulletin | 2023
This story begins, “Eighty kilometers outside Kolkata International airport, and your busy bee life is a vibrant static reflection on a lavender-rose, wrapped by the rental company’s ribbon.”
“The Body Otherwise” by Reni Roxas
Wellspringwords | 2024
This essay begins, “On my second night in the hospital, I had a dream. In my dream, I was waiting for an old friend. Instead, I found myself joining someone else, a new acquaintance, on a walk.”
West Trestle Review | 2023
This poem begins, “My mother often says, the neem tree standing tall / as dignity arouses in her a sense of relief. I think / by this she means the sways of it….”
“To the Obāsan at the Breakfast Café” by Lauren Mariko Scherr
Off Assignment | 2023
This essay begins, “I arrived in Kanazawa just in time for the maples to turn scarlet. I walked through the old town, past tatami shops and teahouses, scanning my memory for half-recalled words.”
“Self-Portrait as Brother’s Mouth” by Sreshtha Sen
The Kenyon Review | 2023
This poem begins, “So I am / both me & man / under stubble / swollen / in volume instead of rusted want.”
“Allegiance” by Asako Serizawa
The Hudson Review | 2013
This story begins, “He was a man of principle, Masaharu told himself. After all, he’d kept his head, even in the midst of that nonsense war, which had gone much too far—anyone could’ve told anyone that by the dismal end of it.”
“In your car, you track the distance of lost homes” by Purvi Shah
Another Chicago Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, “In rotation between constant work & sped-up sleep, they would race / against loneliness, together in a borrowed car from Chicago to New / York City, land of a million lights & a couple / of old friends.”
“To the Train Station Fortuneteller” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne
Off Assignment | 2022
This essay begins, “At first, the railway station looked no different from so many others I’d seen in China: concrete columns, opaque windows, a traffic circle ringed with idling cars.”
“Falling Action in Hoboken” by Lucy Tan
The Sun | 2024
This story begins, “It’s Ladies’ Night at the Shriveled Gun, but none of the women who used to come around here do anymore. Lauren and I are the only ones sitting at the bar.”
“Mad Libs Sonnet: Portrait of My Father” by Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat
The ASP Bulletin | 2023
This poem begins, “My father is a ______ (random noun). What else can I say?”
The Hopkins Review | 2023
This story begins, “For a month afterward, our whole house smelled foul. There was no telling what kind of food scraps were gathering mold in the kitchen trash. What kind of unflushable sap festered in the toilet bowl.”
“In Response To Being Told Me to Take Up More Space” by Rachael Lin Wheeler
ANMLY | 2023
This poem begins, “i am v suspicious of the sky / as i am of many things / bc i hate feeling / as small as i really am / or think i am….”
West Trestle Review | 2023
This poem begins, “We are writing from our dreams. / I am not asleep. / I hold one hand in the other. / We notice the topography of our palms.”
Slant’d | 2021
This issue—featuring Amy Chu, Anna Lee, Emily Villanueva, Geena Chen, and more—“encourages us to dream bigger about what our future could look like when we make room for wonder as an inspiration for action.”
“Atomic Excitation” by Lucy Zhang
Midway Journal | 2021
This piece begins, “We were copper & boric acid & methanol as gas line antifreeze & eager to die as we were to live.”
“Young, Asian, Female, Alone” by Willa Zhang
The Hopkins Review | 2023
This essay begins, “‘Hey!’ you said, your voice flagging me down. ‘I noticed you also have California plates.’ You gestured at my car, then your car.”
