Kawika Guillermo is a story maker whose personal history flows through many sites around and within the Pacific. His first novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best Novel. He has published over forty short stories in journals like The Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, Tayo, Smokelong Quarterly, and decomp journal, where he currently serves as the Managing Editor.
Under his patrilineal/legal name, Chris Patterson, he is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and is the author of the non-fiction books Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020).
Kawika identifies as queer, gender fluid, and Filipino/Chinese/Hawaiian/white settler. Kawika is the name intended for him by his mother, and Guillermo is her maiden name. He recently completed Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir about growing up as the queer grandchild of a white preacher in a mixed-race family living first in Portland during the AIDS pandemic and then in Las Vegas at the height of the War on Terror, charting the course to understanding his own queerness and Filipino identity against a backdrop of white supremacy. He is currently at work on Of Floating Isles: essays on video games, a mix of personal and cultural criticism essays about anarchy and belonging through the lens of gaming.
Kawika is represented by Laura Cameron.