We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word
Editors: Franny Choi, Bao Phi, Noʻu Revilla, Terisa Siagatonu
Contributors:, Marilyn Chin, Joshua Nguyen, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-KayTrask
Publisher: Haymarket: 2024
Format: Paperback: New
ISBN: 9798888900871
DESCRIPTION
A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label "Asian American and Pacific Islander" in today's world.
In this thoughtfully curated, intergenerational collection, poets of multiple languages, lands, and waters write against and through the contested terrain of AAPI identity. Too often, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans are squeezed into the same story. The poets gathered here, and the lineages they represent, exceed this sameness. May this anthology uplift complexities and incite transformation and joy.
Contributors include Marilyn Chin, Joshua Nguyen, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and many more writers, both established and emerging.
Biographical Note:
Franny Choi is the author of three poetry collections: The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Lily/Rosenberg Fellowship, Princeton's Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Elgin Award, Franny is Faculty in Literature at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge. They are at work on an essay collection about Asian robot women, forthcoming from Ecco.
Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry. He has two collections of poems, both published by Coffee House Press, Sông I Sing and Thousand Star Hotel, the latter of which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award, named by NPR as one of the best books of 2017, and was chosen as 2017's best poetry book of the year by San Francisco State's Poetry Center.
Noʻu Revilla (she / her / ʻo ia) is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. Born and raised with the Līlīlehua rain of Waiehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves with the Līlīlehua rain of Pālolo on Oʻahu. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series. Her writing has been featured in Poetry, Lit Hub, ANMLY, Beloit, Poetry Northwest, and the Library of Congress. Her work has also been adapted for theatrical productions in Aotearoa as well as art exhibitions for the Honolulu Museum of Art and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a lifetime "slyly / reproductive" student of Haunani-Kay Trask and teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. Her presence in the poetry world as a queer Samoan woman and activist has granted her opportunities to perform and speak in places ranging from the White House (during the Obama administration) to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France. A Kundiman Fellow and 2019 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100 List Honoree, her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, KQED, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and Upworthy.
An Asian American A to Z: A Children's Guide to Our History
Contributor(s): Linh Che, Cathy (Author) , Wu, Kyle Lucia (Author) , Ramchandran, Kavita (Illustrator)
9781642599459 HARDCOVER
A comprehensive and spirited exploration of Asian American history--its movements, cultures, and key figures--beautifully illustrated and compellingly told for readers of all ages.
Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: September 21, 2023
Format: Hardcover
Condition: New
ISBN: 9781009222259
Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America
Author: William Gee Wong
Publisher: Temple: 2024
Format: Hardcover
Condition: New
ISBN: 9781439924877
Rockin' the Boat: Flashbacks of the 1970s Asian Movement
Author: Mary Uyematsu Kao
Publisher: Eastwind Books: 2025; 2nd Edition
Format: Paperback
Condition: New
ISBN: 9798218580285
A co-publication of Mary Uyematsu Kao
and Eastwind Books of Berkeley
Description
Literary Nonfiction. Photography. Asian & Asian American Studies. ROCKIN' THE BOAT is a photographic journey into the Asian A*merican Movement from 1969 to 1974 by photojournalist Mary Uyematsu Kao. Never-before seen photographs help tell the story of the beginnings of Asian America from immigrant demonstrations in Chinatowns to Japanese American youth and multigenerational community activism in California and New York.
Contributors
Tomie Arai
Harvey & Bea Dong
Sherry Hirota
Miya Iwataki
Kenwood Jung
Russell C. Leong
Sandy Maeshiro
Vivian Matsushige
Misono Iwata Miller
Nobuko Miyamoto
Marlene Murakami
Wendy Nagatani
Scott Nagatani
James Okazaki
Elsie (Uyematsu) Osajima
Elaine Takahashi
Rex Takahashi
Lillian Tamoria
Author
Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, Mary Uyematsu Kao attended UCLA during the struggle to establish Asian American Studies on campus. Kao worked for 30 years at AASC before retiring in 2018 and she is known for her graphic design work for AASC Press publications, especially Amerasia Journal. Recognized for her role as an activist as well as a photographer documenting Asian American community events in southern California and beyond. https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/author/kao-mary/
Yellow Rain: Poems
Author: Mai Der Vang
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publish Date: September 21, 2021
Pages: 176
Format: Paperback
Condition: New
ISBN: 9781644450659
Nothing Like Freedom: Poems
Author: Nellie Wong
Publisher: HongHongLookLook: 2024
Format: Paperback
Condition: New
ISBN: 9798991400800
DESCRIPTION
"To dream in oceans of stories, listening to echoes from rituals, ancient and new."Poet Nellie Wong celebrates her ninetieth birthday with a specially curated book of poetry, exploring themes of family, art, activism and aging. Marking her 50th anniversary as a published poet, Nothing Like Freedom is Nellie Wong's fifth collection of poetry, following Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2012), Stolen Moments (1997), Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), and Dreams of Harrison Railroad Park (1977).
"As she marks her 90th birthday, the poet and activist Nellie Wong has given us a gift: a new collection of poems that bridges the decades of her remarkable career, with work that spans the 1970s to the present. In Nothing Like Freedom, Wong shares with us a lifetime of memories."
- TIMOTHY YU, Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"These poems are vivid postcards that bring you right there as if standing over Nellie's shoulder as she writes/remembers/relives. They are moving slices of life that we get to partake of and in, voyeurs sopping up all the minute, richly, savoring details."
- OPAL PALMER ADISA, Author of "The Storyteller's Return"
"For the last fifty years, Nellie Wong's poetry has been sounding clarion calls of truth and represents an essential voice in American literature."
- KAZIM ALI, Author of "The Voice of Sheila Chandra"
"These poems are the work of a steady hand, so many wonderful lines that take you to unexpected places. I will leave them for you to discover, this collection is a treasure."
- KIM SHUCK, 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita; Author of "Pick a Garnet to Sleep In"
AUTHOR
Wong was born in Oakland, California to immigrant parents. Her father had immigrated to Oakland in 1912. Wong is a Chinese American poet, feminist, and socialist who has organized and participated in activist groups working to create better conditions for women, workers, and minorities.
To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Harvard University/ Belknap Press: April 8, 2025
Hardcover: New
9780674298170
AUTOGRAPHED SIGNATURE PLATE
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.
Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.
Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen's craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother's mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer's responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless--or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the "minor" writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to "model minorities" such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.
Contributor Bio:
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer and of Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the first Asian American member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Born in Vietnam, Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee with his parents and grew up in San Jose, CA, where his family opened the city's second Vietnamese grocery store. He lives in Pasadena, CA.
Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
Jeff Chang
Harper Collins: Sept 28, 2025
Hardcover: New
9780358726470
Top 10 Best Books for 2025 (Publishers Weekly)
More than a half-century after his passing, Bruce Lee is as towering a figure to people around the world as ever. On his path to becoming a global icon, he popularized martial arts in the West, became a bridge to people and cultures from the East, and just as he was set to conquer Hollywood once and for all, he died of cerebral edema at age thirty-two. It's no wonder that Bruce Lee's legend has only bloomed in the decades since. Yet, in so many ways, the legend has eclipsed the man.
Forgotten is the stark reality of the baby boy born in segregated San Francisco, who spent his youth in war-ravaged, fight-crazy Hong Kong. Forgotten is the curious teenager who found his way back to America, where he embraced West Coast counterculture and meshed it with the Asian worldviews and philosophies that reared him. Forgotten is the man whose very presence broke barriers and helped shape the idea of what being an Asian in America is, at the very dawn of Asian America.
Water Mirror Echo--a title inspired by Bruce Lee's own way of moving, being and responding to the world--is a page-turning and powerful reminder. At the helm is Jeff Chang, the award-winning author of Can't Stop Won't Stop, whose writing on culture, politics, the arts and music have made him one of the most acclaimed and distinctive voices of our time. In his hands, Bruce Lee's story brims with authenticity.
Now, based on in-depth interviews with Lee's closest intimates, thousands of newly available personal documents, and featuring dozens of gorgeous photographs from the family's archive, Chang achieves the nearly impossible. He reveals the man behind the enduring iconography and stirringly shows Lee's growing fame ushering in something that's turned out to be even more enduring: the creation of Asian America.
Contributor Bio:Chang, Jeff
Jeff Chang's first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, was named one of the best American nonfiction books of the last quarter century. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and, among numerous other honors, has won the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Chang has written three other acclaimed bestsellers on American history and culture, music, and the arts. In May 2019, he and director Bao Nguyen created a four-episode digital series adaptation of his award-winning book We Gon' Be Alright for PBS Indie Lens Storycast. Chang was featured in Nguyen's ESPN Bruce Lee documentary, Be Water; the PBS series, Asian Americans; and Lisa Ling's CNN series, This Is Life.
Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America
Author: Luo, Michael
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Hardcover pages 560
9780385548571
AUTHOR SIGNED BOOK PLATE AVAILABLE
April 30, 2025. Book Talk at Politics & Prose Bookstore on YouTube.
Strangers in the Land tells the story of a people who, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, migrated by the tens of thousands to a distant land they called Gum Shan--Gold Mountain. Americans initially welcomed these Chinese arrivals, but, as their numbers grew, horrific episodes of racial terror erupted on the Pacific coast. A prolonged economic downturn that idled legions of white workingmen helped create the conditions for what came next: a series of progressively more onerous federal laws aimed at excluding Chinese laborers from the country, marking the first time the United States barred a people based on their race.
In a captivating debut, Michael Luo follows the Chinese from these early years to modern times, as they persisted in the face of bigotry and persecution, revealing anew the complications of our multiracial democracy. Luo writes of early victims of anti-Asian violence, like Gene Tong, a Los Angeles herbalist who was dragged from his apartment and hanged by a mob during one of the worst mass lynchings in the country's history; of demagogues like Denis Kearney, a sandlot orator who became the face of the anti-Chinese movement in the late-1870s; of the pioneering activist Wong Chin Foo and other leaders of the Chinese community, who pressed their new homeland to live up to its stated ideals.
At the book's heart is a shameful chapter of American history: the brutal driving out of Chinese residents from towns across the American West. The Chinese became the country's first undocumented immigrants: hounded, counted, suspected, surveilled.In 1889, while upholding Chinese exclusion, Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field characterized them as "strangers in the land." Only in 1965 did America's gates swing open to people like Luo's parents, immigrants from Taiwan. Today there are more than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States and yet the "stranger" label, Luo writes, remains. Drawing on archives from across the country and written with a New Yorker writer's style and sweep, Strangers in the Land is revelatory and unforgettable, an essential American story.
Biographical Note:
MICHAEL LUO is an executive editor at The New Yorker and writes regularly for the magazine on politics, religion, and Asian American issues. He joined The New Yorker in 2016. Before that, he spent thirteen years at the New York Times, as a metro reporter, national correspondent, and investigative reporter and editor. He is a recipient of a George Polk Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Random House: 2023
Format: Paperback; 496 pages
Condition: New
ISBN: 9780593230275
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not."
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Isabel Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Biographical Note:
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine's list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn (Author)
Harper: 2015
Paperback: 2015
9780062397348
THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools--with its emphasis on great men in high places--to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, it is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of and in the words of America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers. As Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles--the fights for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality--were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance.
Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through President Clinton's first term, A
People's History of the United States features insightful analysis of the
most important events in our history. This edition also includes an
introduction by Anthony Arnove, who wrote, directed, and produced The People
Speak with Zinn and who coauthored, with Zinn, Voices of a People's History
of the United States.
Contributor Bio: Zinn, Howard
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was a historian, playwright, and social activist. In addition to A People's History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies, he is the author of numerous books including The People Speak, Passionate Declarations, and the autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.