Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author and third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and in 2023 was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel,All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their first prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was published in 2023 by Duke University Press, and was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Their most recent book is Of Floating Isles: on growing pains and video games. Kawika has lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and currently resides in Vancouver, Canada, where they work as an Associate Professor of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.
Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name of Christopher B. Patterson, who is author of the academic books Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, and Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination. They co-edited the anthologies Transpacific, Undisciplined and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us.
Follow on Instagram & X @kawikaguillermo or email kawikaguillermo(at)gmail.com.
Kawika Guillermo 