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
University of Nebraska Press | 2019
ISBN: 9781496215703
Winner of the 2018 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, in this book Aber “explores the historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations” through lyric and documentary poems and essayistic fragments.
Graywolf Press | 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55597-589-0
Through lyric and narrative poems, Ahmed’s “keen observations on birth, motherhood, and death offer a unique way into the beckoning world.”
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781949944587
According to Publishers Weekly, in this collection Ali “draws from the Quran and the Bible as vehicles for a deeper consideration of the intersections of family, gender, and faith.”
Hanging Loose Press | 2024
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.”
Desire/Halves by Jaia Hamid Bashir
Nine Syllables Press | 2024
ISBN: 979-8988164913
In this chapbook, Bashir “navigates between English, Urdu, and Spanish, examining the interplay of these languages and the experience of being Pakistani-American.”
Year of the Murder Hornet by Tina Cane
Veliz Books | 2022
ISBN: 978-1949776126
In this collection, Cane “interrogates and wrestles with notions of personal narrative, theory, and truth, as well as our collective cultural realities.”
CavanKerry Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-933880-89-1
Cho’s poetry collection “provides a rare glimpse into the cultures of Asian America, particularly the Korean immigrant and Korean American experiences.”
Futurepoem | 2021
ISBN: 978-1733038430
In Choi’s poems, “music, mathematics, philosophical logic, and lyric convention come in and out of relation to press upon questions of form and meaning-making.”
The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen
Black Square Editions | 2022
ISBN: 979-8986036908
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.”
Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass
Perugia Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781646053568
Joan Kwon Glass’s latest collection is “part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience.”
Unrevolutionary Times by Houman Harouni
Arrowsmith Press | 2022
ISBN: 9798986340142
Harouni’s debut collection mixes “contemporary poetic freedom with traditional Persian rhythm and form” and asks, “What happens to the revolutionary soul in times when no revolution is at hand?”
Noemi Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-934819-87-6
Hong’s book “loosely navigates the archived immigration trial of Hong On, a biracial Alaska Native-Chinese man, in 1912 on Angel Island, CA during the Chinese Exclusion Act.”
The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani
Perugia Press | 2023
ISBN: 978-0997807677
This debut collection, “conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth.”
Fernwood Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781594981074
According to Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Huynh “takes us into the deep inquiries of a mind fully engaged with both the known and unknowable” in these poems “informed by mythology, history, religion, and science.”
When I Was the Wind by Hannah Lee Jones
June Road Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7356783-6-8
In Jones’s debut collection, “four cardinal directions point the way through this inner wilderness, through trials and initiations, suffering and discovery, on a restless quest for deeper connection and wholeness.”
Airlie Press | 2025
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.”
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781949487480
Kim’s debut collection “evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self.”
Accidental Hope by Diana Kurniawan
Middle Creek Publishing & Audio | 2025
ISBN: 9781957483290
According to David Anthony Martin, these poems “give voice to anyone seeking the words and the map to guide them through oppression and hopelessness.”
Fahmidan Publishing & Co. | 2021
According to Rachael Crosbie, this collection, using English, Tagalog, and Cebuano, “commands language with a blend of love and sorrow” to examine “generational trauma and the passing of a family member.”
Acre Books | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-946724-51-9
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
ISBN: 9781639820900
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
ISBN: 9780986005008
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.”
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin
Alice James Books | 2025
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.”
The Machine Autocorrects Code to I by Chanlee Luu
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941551-43-1
According to Candice Wuehle, Luu’s collection is “a Whitmaniac study of the multitudes of being that venerates spirituality, origins, and political outrage with the same care as is given to pancakes, puzzles, and pop stars.”
Futurepoem | 2018
ISBN: 978-0996002561
According to Yasmin Adele Majeed, Marchan’s poems, which are drawn from her childhood experience of Hurricane Katrina, take in “the whole stretch of New Orleans on an intimate level—it’s people, it’s music, it’s idiom, and it’s bloat.”
The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-en
Cleveland State University Poetry Center | 2016
ISBN: 9780996316736
According to Timothy Yu, this collection is “a journey across a dizzying landscape of immigrants and androids, of alien romance and elegies.”
American Inmate by Justin Rovillos Monson
Haymarket Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781642599732
This is a “rigorous and defiant collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature.”
Dialect of Distant Harbors by Dipika Mukherjee
CavanKerry Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-933880-93-8
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.”
The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Noemi Press | 2018
ISBN: 978-1-934819-74-6
According to Jenny Boully, this collection “clutches close the realms of memory, dream, and imagination, erasing the boundaries between the living and the dead, the sky and the earth, reality and myth.”
University of Nebraska Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781496227904
In this book of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems—which won the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry—Nguyen “sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora” in a small American town.
Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu
Host Publications | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7376050-5-8
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
ISBN: 9781632431189
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.”
Habitat Threshold by Craig Santos Perez
Omnidawn | 2020
ISBN: 9781632430809
Perez’s poetry collection “explores his ancestry as a native Pacific Islander, the ecological plight of his homeland, and his fears for the future.”
Copper Canyon Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781556596568
This hybrid collection of poems and essays “draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad’s completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943).”
Empire of Surrender by Michael Schmeltzer
Wandering Aengus Press | 2022
ISBN: 9780578308418
The poems in this collection ask, “How and why do we hurt each other? What is lost in such acts of cruelty? And how can we cling to kindness as resistance?”
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
Nightboat Books | 2023
ISBN: 9781643621715
A finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award in Poetry, Hydra Medusa is “a book of poetry, dreams and speculative talks, collected from the psychic detritus of living in the US-Mexico borderlands.”
Savage Pageant by Jessica Q. Stark
Birds, LLC | 2020
ISBN: 9780982617731
This book “recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood’s show animals up until its closure in 1969.”
Fonograf Editions | 2020
ISBN: 9781734456622
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.’”
Particles of a Stranger Light by Anthony Sutton
Veliz Books | 2023
ISBN: 978-1949776133
This collection “employs a wide array of approaches and forms to obsessively dissect issues of memory, identity, culture, and history.”
It Wasn’t a Dream by Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat
Fahmidan Publishing & Co. | 2022
It Wasn’t a Dream is “a surrealist prose poetry chapbook about everyday experiences with unexpected characters, like a Siamese fighting fish, a free-spirited wolf, a giant talking bat, ancestor spirits, and more.”
Graywolf Press | 2025
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.”
Nightboat Books | 2021
ISBN: 9781643620701
A finalist for the 2022 Firecracker Award in Poetry, this collection “maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.”
I ask about what falls away by Jason Magabo Perez
Kaya Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781885030894
Perez’s second full-length collection is “an extended elegy set in the alleyways and Pacific-bound boulevards of San Diego, California during the current global health crisis.”
My Name Is Immigrant by Wang Ping
Hanging Loose Press | 2021
ISBN: 978-1-934909-66-9
Wang’s latest poetry collection is a “song for the plight and pride of immigrants around the globe.”
Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle
Fonograf Editions | 2021
ISBN: 9781734456660
This debut collection focuses “on immigration, colonialism, and the death of the speaker’s infant daughter.”
We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word
Haymarket Books | 2024
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.”
The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith & Spirit
Orison Books | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949039-05-4
According to Julie Wan, this anthology, featuring sixty-two poets, “offers many entry points into geography and history, into faith and spirit, and into language and poetry.”
Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems by C. Dale Young
Four Way Books | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961897-32-8
The poems in this collection “explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay.”
Fiction
The Door to Inferna: An Elklorian Novel by Rishab Borah
Three Rooms Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-941110-96-6
This middle-grade fantasy novel follows fourteen-year-old Khioneus Nevula, who is drawn into a mystical land where “he meets his twin sister, a proficient mage, a slightly mad scientist, and a princess.”
Bitter Over Sweet by Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2025
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.”
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2020
ISBN: 9781733777759
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.”
The Colors of April: Fiction on the Vietnam War’s Legacy 50 Years Later
Three Rooms Press | 2025
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.
The Parted Earth by Anjali Enjeti
Hub City Press | 2021
ISBN: 9781938235-96-2
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 Coconut Crab by Peter W. Fong
Green Writers Press | 2022
ISBN: 9781950584574
Fong’s chapter book for advanced readers “charts the intertwining friendships of a crab, a goat, a bird, and a gecko” and “the usual challenges of our eat-or-be-eaten world.”
The Eunuch’s Daughter & Stories by Khanh Ha
Blackwater Press | 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9886158-8-0
According to Washington Writers’ Publishing House, this short story collection contains “extraordinary writing, interesting characters and a fascinating depiction of Vietnam’s history.”
Black Lawrence Press | 2025
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.”
The Burning Heart of the World by Nancy Kricorian
Red Hen Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781636281933
In this story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War, Kricorian “conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile.”
Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam
Red Hen Press | 2025
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.”
The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers
Rose Metal Press | 2022
ISBN: 9781941628270
In these stories, Sawers “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.”
Deep Vellum | 2025
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.”
Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Burrow Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1-941681-28-2
In this horror novellette, the unnamed narrator meets her girlfriend’s parents for the first time and “finds herself stranded in a family’s decades-long mourning ritual.”
Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Kaya Press | 2025
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, Drama & Multi-Genre Works
Hub City Press | 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-71-9
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.”
Flowers of Hawai‘i by Lee Cataluna
Bamboo Ridge Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1943756070
Flowers of Hawai‘i features “scripts and photos from four plays written and produced in the last dozen years that capture various aspects of Hawai‘i life and culture.”
The Boat Not Taken by Joanna Choi Kalbus
WTAW Press | 2025
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.”
53rd State Press | 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9978664-7-6
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.”
The Forest for the Trees by Leslie Li
Black Lawrence Press | 2024
ISBN: 9781625571519
Li’s book is “a dark comedy about a clash of cultures and generations, a biracial coming-of-age story, and a psychological thriller about inherited trauma.”
Wendy’s Subway | 2023
ISBN: 979-8-9863375-3-1
In this fictional text, Lim “resurrects ghostly and unidentified voices (VOX) that linger in Sung Tieu’s Infra-Specter exhibition.”
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin
Dorothy, a publishing project | 2025
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.”
The 3rd Thing | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7379258-6-6
This work of poetry and graphic narrative “conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows.”
Black Avatar and Other Essays by Amit Majmudar
Acre Books | 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946724-61-8
These eight essays reflect Majmudar’s “comprehensive studies of American, European, and Indian traditions, as well as his experiences in both suburban Ohio and the western Indian state of Gujarat.”
Wendy’s Subway | 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9863375-0-0
The Book of Na “reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders.”
Commentary on the Birds by Jed Munson
Rescue Press | 2023
ISBN: 9781734831672
Drawing on his time as a Fulbright scholar, Munson’s essay collection “excavates the geopolitical reality and symbolic weight of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.”
Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi
Trio House Press | 2025
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.”
Burrow Press | 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941681-30-5
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.”
Joyous Resilience by Anjuli Sherin
North Atlantic Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781623174231
Sherin’s book “shows us how cultivating self-nurturance, healthy boundaries, pleasure, and a soulful connection to the natural world can give us the generative energy needed to heal individual and collective trauma.”
Snaring New Suns: Speculative Works from Hawai‘i and Beyond
Bamboo Ridge Press | 2022
ISBN: 978-1943756087
“Inspired by the subversive nature of Maui and other tricksters in Pacific mythology,” this genre-blending anthology of speculative fiction, poetry, and art features forty-eight writers exploring “the supernatural, alternate reality, climate fiction, and more.”
When No Thing Works by Norma Wong
North Atlantic Books | 2024
ISBN: 9798889840992
Wong’s book features “spiritual and community lessons for embracing collective care, co-creating sustainable worlds, and responsibly meeting uncertain futures.”
Literary Magazines
Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month Playlist
Shō Poetry Journal | 2025
This playlist features poems and audio recordings by poets recently published in Shō Poetry Journal, including Sati Mookherjee, Elise Thi Tran, Vannida S. Kol, Jessica Nirvana Ram, and more.
“Here’s a Love Poem Sleeping” by Darius Atefat-Peckham
Southeast Review | 2022
This poem begins, “together in bed, thinking about how much I / love your tired voice, tired you…”
“Dinner with Enya” by Jasmine Basuel
The Core Review | 2024
This piece begins, “Netty was kissed outside the apartment building. Her girlfriend’s lips were dry and the press was quick and after she pulled back, Netty licked her lips like there was something to taste.”
“Atlanta, USA” by Mark Kyungsoo Bias
The Georgia Review | 2024
This poem begins, “This is what it looks like. To be moving in / every direction at once. / Punching through July heat…”
“Zombie Apocalypse Now: Revival” by Cathy Linh Che
New England Review | 2025
This poem begins, “I wait to be reanimated. / Love is like that— / resurrecting you from the dead. / I step off the conveyor belt / in the people factory.”
“The Art of Loss” by Wendy Chen
The Margins | 2025
This essay begins, “What, in actuality, is lost in translation? Meaning? Voice? Sound? How does a translator choose what to lose and what to preserve from the original work?”
“Breastfeeding During a Heatwave” by Nina Li Coomes
The Margins | 2025
This essay begins, “I learn to breastfeed during a heat wave. In Chicago, where I live, the heat index reads almost 120 degrees in August 2023.”
“from ‘Substitute Heart’” by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Poetry | 2022
This poem begins, “A single human life migrates through many lifetimes, / according to the books she read to me. / The word migrant is cousin to nomad which is what her ancestors were.”
The Cincinnati Review | 2024
This essay begins, “Although I have now lived inside the ivory tower for longer than I ever lived outside it, my arrival first felt like exile.”
ANMLY | 2024
This poem begins, “you wedged your tongue between my ribs, speaking of shadows and skeletons / I split open my body so the syllables could better haunt my crevices…”
Slant’d | 2024
The most recent issue of Slant’d features twelve stories that “unpack the different layers of homecoming—belonging, reconciliation, transformation, homelands, self-discovery—along with the complex feelings and experiences that come with it.”
Karahee from the Cane Fields: Writing From Coolie Diaspora
Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing | 2024
ISBN: 9798880700608
The writers in this issue “explore their ancestral ties to land and indenture, and question what is the inheritance of the cane field, the cane-sap residue marking the descendants of this system of indenture?”
“Daughters Jitterbugging” by Ela Kini
West Trestle Review | 2024
This poem begins, “let yourself drift aimless into another summer, holding / another’s hand, something more than nothing at all…”
Does It Have Pockets | 2024
The poem “What Happens Behind Boarded Windows” begins, “happens because the weather man says / it will be a very wet, very windy night. / Before nightfall, we nail wooden planks / over our eyes…”
“Mom could have been a dancer” by Lulu Liu
Apple Valley Review | 2024
This poem begins, “But she missed her big audition, so was / Swept with the rest into the countryside.”
“Performing Care” by Adil Mansoor
The Georgia Review | 2025
This essay begins, “In the face of precarity, unsustainability, and isolation, artists, activists, and revolutionaries are turning to care.”
“The Iraqi Nights, Section 7” by Dunya Mikhail
Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
Split This Rock | 2016
This poem begins, “In Iraq, / after a thousand and one nights, / someone will talk to someone else. / Markets will open / for regular customers.”
“The Winter Days” by Arlene Naganawa
West Trestle Review | 2024
This poem begins, “Wake before dawn, steel moon in the window. / Window, attic, bedroom, milk. The lamp / wanders in the light…”
Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing | 2023
ISBN: 9780824897253
This issue—featuring Rob Arnold, Yasmine Romero, Humlåo Evans, Mary Therese Perez Hattori, and more—introduces readers to “the vibrancy of CHamoru literature, culture, histories, migrations, politics, memories, traumas, and dreams.”
Poetry | 2016
Edited by Craig Santos Perez, this special issue features writing by Teresia Teaiwa, No‘u Revilla, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, and more.
The Cincinnati Review | 2024
This story begins, “At the docks, after you were gone, I watched a fisherman gut a small gator gar with a serrated sandwich knife.”
“Missionaries in Yunnan” by Vanessa Y. Niu
Kitchen Table Quarterly | 2025
This poem begins, “They built a new aquarium. To keep us / busy. What of it? They felt the ache / of blank space there.”
“Beyond ‘Hate’: Evading the Carceral Trap of Asian American Grievance” by Rose Nguyen
The Drift | 2022
This essay begins, “To mark the one-year anniversary of the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that left eight people dead, six of whom were ethnically Chinese or Korean women, The New York Times published an op-ed by Korean American novelist Min Jin Lee…”
“Show Me a Mother” by Tiana Nobile
Adi Magazine | 2023
This poem begins, “You rinsed off your distress in the shower / as your placenta peeled from the edge of your body.”
“Adaptive Joy” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Orion Magazine | 2021
This essay begins, “Disabled people aren’t supposed to be anywhere—let alone the woods—having a great time, as evinced by the tiny blonde girl who screams as I speed by on my racing recumbent trike.”
Kitchen Table Quarterly | 2025
This poem begins, “Every time I lived in a foreign country, it was the touch of my people I missed. / Fragrant warmth of my mamma’s rice-scented flesh…”
“the best & the brightest” by Esther Ra
Does It Have Pockets | 2025
This essay begins, “I listen to elite law firm attorneys speak of students from lesser schools or lower grades, and a look of disdain crosses their faces, like a cloud briefly obscuring the blinding blue sky.”
“Light Multiplies: Healing and Mothering Across the Divide” by Seema Reza
Adi Magazine | 2023
This essay begins, “In African elephant and certain whale populations, the age and health of the oldest female is an important indicator of the well-being of the youngest animals in the herd.”
“My Mom Told Me” by Siavash Saadlou
Southeast Review | 2022
This essay begins, “With Tehran’s November breeze running through the pores of my skin, I took my spot in line alongside other first graders in the school’s cobblestone yard.”
“Good Immigrant Novels: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Aesthetics of Respectability” by Sanjena Sathian
The Drift | 2021
This essay begins, “When I was in tenth grade, my favorite English teacher pulled me aside ceremoniously to deliver some news.”
“Train to Harbin” by Asako Serizawa
The Hudson Review | 2014
This story begins, “I once met a man on the train to Harbin. He was my age, just past his prime, hair starting to grease and thin in a way one might have thought passably distinguished in another context…”
“But I repeat myself.” by Addie Tsai
manywor(l)ds | 2024
This poem begins, “you’ve told me this before / you’ve told me this before / you’ve told me this before / you’ve told me this before…”
“Aimai-sa” by Tony Wallin-Sato
Another Chicago Magazine | 2024
This story begins, “Are you hapa? He lets the question seep in, like late rain in dry soil. He knows the answer to the question, yet he is unable to articulate the sentiment.”
“Last Words from Y2K” by jonah wu
manywor(l)ds | 2024
This poem begins, “I thought I told you before: you can’t just fall asleep on the phone like that. You have to be firm. You have to tell / the other person goodbye…”
ANMLY | 2024
This poem begins, “It’s true New York must always follow Shanghai. A wide river / exchanging hands with the drowned valley.”
Another Chicago Magazine | 2025
The poem “Hu Tianbao, God of Rabbits” begins, “The train leaves without a word. Tonight, / each tender valley clenches into your chest. / I have been on my knees so long…”
“Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often” by Nicole Zhu
New England Review | 2024
This story begins, “There are ways to see individual atoms and galaxies 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, but there is no microscope to see lonely people.”
