Press

News:

October 9, 2025: Upcoming Event at Real Vancouver Writers’ Series

November 5, 2025: Upcoming Book Talk at Vancouver Public Library

Interview on Of Floating Isles with Vinh Nguyen at Hamilton Review of Books

Awards:

for Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir

• Finalist for the 2024 Bisexual Nonfiction Lammy (Lambda) Award
• Finalist in both Poetry and Narrative Poetry from the 2024 American Book Fest Awards

for Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games

• Finalist for the 2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association
• Runner up for the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award

for All Flowers Bloom

• Winner of the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel

for Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific

• Winner of the 2020 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies

for Stamped: an anti-travel novel

• Winner of the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Book Award in Prose
• Award-Winning Finalist in the Fiction: Literary category of the 2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest

Others

• Arts Faculty Early Career Teaching Award, Hong Kong Baptist University, May 2018.
• Finalist for the 2016 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize, American Studies Association, 2016.
• Featured on Wigleaf’s Top 50 Short Fiction Stories of 2013
• Nominated for the Pushcart Prize for “The Fog” in The Quotable.

Interviews:

feature in UBC ARTS, “Gaming the System”

On Nimrods and Landbridge. New Books in Asian American Studies, 2023.

Author Interview by Nathalie De Los Santos. Chopsticks Alley. April 2021.

“In Conversation with Kawika Guillermo.” Ricepaper Magazine. January 2020.

“Post-book: Kawika Guillermo.” The Halo Halo Review. November 2019.

“Interview with Kawika Guillermo.” Asian Books Blog. May 2019.

“Stamped: an anti-travel novel.” New Books in Asian American Studies. August 2018.

“Interview with Kawika Guillermo.” Anak Sastra. January 31, 2014.

“Smoking with Kawika Guillermo.” Interview by Brandon Wicks. Apr 2012

Readings:

Reading of “What Fell Beneath the Tracks” by Brad Powers

Reviews:

for Of Floating Isles: on growing pains and video games

•  Boing Boing

for Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir

• Canadian Literature
• The Journal of American Culture
• Out South Florida
• ReaderViews
• The British Columbia Review
• Publisher’s Weekly
• The Ubyssey

for All Flowers Bloom

• Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
• Bookish Asia
• ReaderViews 
• Entropy Magazine
• Run Along the Shelves

for Stamped: an anti-travel novel

• The Atticus Review
• Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
• Entropy Magazine
• Bookish Asia
• Anomaly Magazine

“The Last of Its Kind” reviewed in Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond: “The last magician hunts the last dragon in the days of a decaying imperium. Sad, poignant tale.”

“No Name Islands” review: “I think this story was the most visceral for me, despite how short it is. Here, too, we are in a speculative world of what might be with regard to ecology, this time with terraforming. The final image in this story will haunt me for a long time.”

“No Name Islands” review on The Star.