This virtual event is part of the 2024 Asian American Literature Festival celebrating ‘Cosmic Kinship.’

From September 14-22, this festival aims to make literature accessible to all through inclusive and hybrid events, fostering a literary constellation that spans the globe.

Join award-winning poet and Bamboo Ridge Press editor-in-chief Cathy Song for a virtual talk story and reading with four authors that have new and upcoming books. It’s a roster that showcases the diversity in Bamboo Ridge writers and a continuation of 45 years of making literary mischief.

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear Wing Tek Lum’s newly released historical poetry that conjures Honolulu’s Chinatown circa 1900s and to preview Donald Carreira Ching’s short story collection rooted in family and place, Scott Kikkawa’s fourth Hawaiʻi Noir novel, and Tamara Wong-Morrison’s lyrical poems and mele. There’s a lot to look forward to and get excited about!

Speakers

Donald Carreira Ching

was born and raised in Kahaluʻu, Oʻahu. His novel, Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle, was published by Bamboo Ridge Press. In 2018, he received an Elliot Cades Award for Literature. He is currently working on his short story collection, Blood Work and Other Stories.

Scott Kikkawa

Scott Kikkawa is the author of Kona Winds, Red Dirt, Char Siu and the upcoming Sporting Girl, from Bamboo Ridge Press, noir detective novels set in postwar Honolulu. He contributed to Akashic Books’ Honolulu Noir and his stories have appeared in crime fiction anthologies edited by Colin Conway and Frank Zafiro. He received an Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and a selection as one of the “Other Distinguished Stories of 2021” in the 2022 Best American Mysteries and Suspense. He is a columnist and an Associate Editor for The Hawai‘i Review of Books. He is a federal law enforcement officer.

Tamara Wong-Morrison

Tamara Wong-Morrison grew up in the mid-1950s and 60s when Hawaiians were on the last rung of the social ladder; she identified more with being part-Chinese. “I was ashamed I was Hawaiian,” she recalls. But, with the emerging Hawaiian renaissance and her family’s active involvement in protesting over-development on her home island of Kaua’i, her often angry and bitter poems emerged and evolved. Her collection of poems and songs written over almost 50 years will be published by Bamboo Ridge Press in 2026.

Wing Tek Lum

Wing Tek Lum is a Honolulu businessman and poet. Bamboo Ridge Press has published two earlier collections of his poetry: Expounding the Doubtful Points (1987, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award) and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2012, winner of a Hawai’i Book Publishers Association Ka Palapala Po’okela Award). With Makoto Ōoka, Joseph Stanton, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, he participated in a collaborative work of linked verse, which was published as What the Kite Thinks by Summer Session, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 1994. He received an Elliot Cades Award for Literature and is a recipient of the Hawai’i Literary Arts Council’s Loretta D. Petrie Award for many years of outstanding service to Hawai‘i’s literary community.

Visit www.bambooridge.org or follow us on Facebook/Instagram @bambooridge