Veronica Alporha
Veronica Alporha is a doctorate student at the Department of History of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Before coming to Hawai'i, she was assistant professor of History at the University of the Philippines where she also acquired her Bachelor of Arts in the Social Sciences, and Master of Arts in History. She is co-author to a college textbook, titled Readings in Philippine History (2017, 2021) and co-hosts a podcast called PODKAS: Conversations on Philippine History, Politics, and Society.
Rita Aryoshi
Rita Ariyoshi, recipient of the award for an established artist, has received numerous awards for her fiction, including a Pushcart Prize, grand prize in the National Steinbeck Short Story Competition and first prize in the University of Hawai’i Ian MacMillan short story competition. Her fiction has been published in magazines and literary journals and collected in anthologies. Lion’s Way, her debut novel, was released September 2022. She is also the author of two non-fiction books and many articles on travel, art and culture which have appeared in Travel and Leisure, Islands Magazine, Travel Holiday, AAA Magazine and a wide variety of international publications.
Donald Carreira Ching
Donald Carreira Ching was born and raised in Kahaluʻu, on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in publications such as StoryQuarterly, Every Day Fiction, and RHINO. In 2015, his debut novel, Between Sky and Sea: a Family's Struggle, was published by Bamboo Ridge Press. In 2018, he received the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Emerging Writer, and in 2021 and 2022, he was a finalist in the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Contest. He is currently working on a short story collection, Blood Work and Other Stories.
Tom Coffman
Tom Coffman’s work in book and documentary film focuses on the social and political development of Hawai‘i. He was chief political reporter of the Honolulu Star Bulletin (1968-73) and since then has been an independent writer and producer. He is the recipient of the State of Hawaiʻi’s Literature Award, and is the author of three prizewinning books about the political history of 20th-century Hawai‘i—The Island Edge of America, Nation Within, and Inclusion
Donovan Kūhiō Colleps
Donovan Kūhiō Colleps is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi poet and editor from Puʻuloa, Oʻahu. His recent work has appeared in When The Light Of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (W.W. Norton), The Slowdown (American Public Media), Poetry, (Poetry Foundation), Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures (University of Hawaiʻi Press), and Poem-a-Day (poets.org). His collection of docupoems, Proposed Additions, was published in 2014 by Tinfish Press.
"As a work of documentary poetry at its finest, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps’ Proposed Additions remembers, records, and honors his grandfather, drawing from sources diverse in language, form, and purpose—mele, mo’olelo, a ventilator manual, a construction budget, the frail corpse of a seahorse. Following his grandfather as family chronicler, Colleps casts an intricate ʻupena of poetic memory, showing us the knots and puka—all that is aching, broken, absent, and yet still strong, beautiful, enduring.This book is a precious offering of ʻŌiwi poetry, masterful in language, craft, musicality, and what matters most—aloha. Read these poems slowly, savor them with raw gratitude for every memory, every moment you have with the people and ʻāina you love deeply." — Brandy Nālani McDougall, Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate 2023-2025 and author of ‘Āina Hānau, Birth Land
Sara Collins
A Senior Archaeologist with Pacific Consulting Services Inc., Sara Collins is also an Affiliate Graduate Faculty member in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She previously worked for the U.S. Army as a physical anthropologist at its POW/MIA identification facility in Hawaiʻi, and then for the State of Hawaiʻi as a regulatory archaeologist at the Historic Preservation Division. Her research interests center on bioarchaeology and historic preservation.
Kealani Cook
Dr. Kealani Cook is an Associate Professor in the Humanities Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, West Oʻahu where he teaches Hawaiian and Pacific history. Originally from Waimea, Hawaiʻi, he now lives on Oʻahu in the Moku of ʻEwa. His dissertation and his book, Return to Kahiki, focused on Native Hawaiian historical connections to other Pacific Island peoples.
Makana Eyre
Makana Eyre, who grew up in Hawai‘i, is an American journalist based in Paris, covering politics, the far right, and the media, with a focus on Europe. His work has appeared in publications, including the Washington Post, the Nation, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy.
In Sing, Memory, Makana Eyre recounts how a Polish musician, a Jewish conductor, a secret choir, and the rescue of a trove of music from Sachsenhausen. Sing, Memory recounts the stories of Aleksander Kulisiewicz and Rosebery d’Arguto without whose unlikely friendship, thousands of compositions, poems, and songs created in the Nazi camps would have been lost forever.
“Through meticulous research and vivid, passionate writing, Makana Eyre has done an extraordinary job of bringing Aleksander Kulisiewicz to life. Sing, Memory is a rich, dense, palpable account of a situation that otherwise would be beyond our imagining.” – Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Staff Writer and Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and dean emeritus, Columbia Journalism School
Alain Gunn
Alain Gunn is a surgeon, an educator, a military officer, a hospital administrator, a scientist, and a writer. His publications include newspaper articles, textbook chapters, scientific research, short stories, and novels. He has published seven novels and one nonfiction book, A Tale of Two Planets, The Transition World, Red Exodus, If Pigs Could Cry, The Honey Bee, and The Death of Aloha (the latter two under the nom de plume A K Gunn). He has also written many short stories, including one published in Mystery in Paradise: 13 Tales of Suspense and Intrigue, one in Dark Paradise:Mysteries in the Land of Aloha, and two in Island Fever: New Mysteries from Hawaii’s Finest Writers.
In The Transition World four astronauts return to Earth after a three-year absence while on the first manned expedition to Mars. But the home they left behind no longer exists. A lethal pandemic has obliterated eighty percent of the population and decimated the social and physical infrastructure of civilization. How do these former astronauts find meaningful existence in a chaotic anti-society so alien to them? Only by redefining their lives, questioning their values, and learning new survival skills can they adapt to this world in transition.
Constance Hale
Constance Hale is a Hawaii-born, California–based writer. Her features on slack-key guitar, sovereignty, Big Island cowboys, the Hawaiian language, and Spam musubi have appeared in publications like the Atlantic, National Geographic Adventure, Smithsonian, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Honolulu. She has written six books on literary style, including Sin and Syntax, as well as a book on hula, The Natives Are Restless, and a book for children, ‘Iwalani‘s Tree. She directs the O‘ahu Writers Retreat. sinandsyntax.com
Connie Hale runs the annual Oahu Wriiters Retreat, Camp Mokuleia, and most recently taught this event at Stanford.
Sydney Lehua Iaukea
Sydney Lehua Iaukea is a Native Hawaiian educator who holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, with an emphasis in Hawaiʻi Politics. She was a recipient of a Mellon Hawaiʻi postdoctoral fellowship and she completed Peace Corps service in Costa Rica. Sydney is from the island of Maui and loves surfing and all things ocean related. Sydney's first book is entitled The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawaiʻi. It was published by the University of California Press and is a recipient of a Ka Palapala Poʻokela Excellence in Publishing award.
Jasmin Iolani Hakes
Jasmin Iolani Hakes was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaii. She is the product of the Filipino, Puerto Rican, and Portuguese laborers who migrated to the Hawaiian Kingdom in the early and mid 1800’s. HULA was inspired in part by her childhood experiences as a non-Native local, as well as her journey as a mother, raising one daughter who is Native Hawaiian and one who isn’t. https://www.jasminiolani.com
“Stunning…an intricately built novel that spans decades, moving in and out of a collective voice, while also telling Hi’i’s deeply personal and devastating story of trying to find her way.” –Los Angeles Times
Joseph Han
Joseph Han, recipient of the award for an emerging artist, is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He was selected as a 2022 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and received a Kundiman fellowship in fiction. His book was long-listed for the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and received the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor. His writing has appeared in the The Rumpus, New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. He is an editor for the West region of Joyland Magazine and an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program. In Spring 2023, he served as the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa.
Mavis Hara
Mavis Hara has long served the Hawai‘i literary community as an educator in the public school system and at Kapiolani Community College. She served as managing editor of Bamboo Ridge Press during its formative years in the 1980s and continued to serve on its board of directors for many years. Presently, she is vice president of the board. Mavis is also the author of an anthology of short stories and poetry, An Offering of Rice.
Mary Therese Perez Hattori
Dr. Mary Therese Perez Hattori is Director of the Pacific Islands Development Program, East-West Center. She holds a B.Ed. and Professional Diploma in Secondary Social Studies with a concentration in Pacific Islands History, an M.Ed. in Educational Technology, and an Ed.D. in Professional Educational Practice from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A native Chamoru of Guåhan, she is a community organizer and advocate for Pacific islanders in Hawai‘i, author, poet, public speaker, philanthropist, and co-organizer of cultural events such as the Annual Cultural Animation Film Festival and the annual Celebrate Micronesia Festival.
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Kristiana Kahakauwila is a hapa writer of kanaka maoli, German and Norwegian descent. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Her first book, This is Paradise: Stories (Hogarth 2013), takes as its heart the people and landscapes of contemporary Hawai'i and was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She is currently at work on a multigenerational novel set on the island of Maui.
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) writer from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Her fiction has been featured in Granta, Conjunctions, Joyland, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, where she was a Fiction Fellow. She lives in Honolulu.
“Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is a short story writer that all other short story writers should study. She has the ability to captivate readers with a single sentence. Her prose bursts with exquisite confidence that makes it hard to believe this is a debut collection. Every Drop is a frontrunner for Book of the Year.”—Debutiful, The Most Anticipated Books of 2023
May Kamaka
May Kamaka is a senior majoring in Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. A great-granddaughter of the founder of Kamaka Ukulele, she was afraid of the ocean until age 14, when she joined a kids' surfing program overseen by the beachboys at Waikiki. Now, "surfing to me is like an escape, like music," May says.
Scott Kikkawa
Scott Kikkawa is a fourth generation Japanese American raised in Hawai‘i Kai. Currently a federal law enforcement officer, the New York University alumnus is the author of three noir detective novels set in postwar Honolulu—Kona Winds, Red Dirt, and Char Siu. He has been honored with an Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and a crime fiction short story of his was selected as one of the “Other Distinguished Stories of 2021” in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022 anthology. He is a columnist and an Associate Editor for The Hawai‘i Review of Books. His short stories have appeared in six issues of Bamboo Ridge, Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts. Kona Winds and Red Dirt debuted on the Small Press Distribution fiction bestseller list and were featured in HONOLULU Magazine’s list of “Essential Hawai‘i Books You Should Read.”
A gifted new voice in crime fiction, Scott Kikkawa delivers 1950s noir from a never-seen-before perspective with lead characters whose sparkling chemistry illuminates every page. Rich in culture and showcasing a neglected history with sensitivity and nuance, this is a series for our times. —Ausma Zehanat Khan, author of the Khattak/Getty crime series
Step aside Raymond Chandler, Scott Kikkawa has arrived to put a new, fresh, and more delicious spin on the noir genre. —Naomi Hirahara, author of the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series
Scott Kikkawa’s Char Siu grabs you by the throat right away and doesn’t ever let go. Kikkawa has accomplished the masterful feat of immediately embroiling the reader in a fascinating time and place. Frankie Yoshikawa is a flawed, complex, and ultimately sympathetic protagonist whose view of the world keeps things interesting. He has plenty to examine—not only vice and murder, but a mixture of different cultures. If traditional noir is what you’re missing, Char Siu will take you on the ride you’re looking for! —Frank Zafiro, author of the River City series
Patrick V. Kirch
Patrick V. Kirch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Hawai‘i born and a graduate of Punahou School, Kirch received his Ph.D. from Yale. After retiring from the Berkeley faculty, in 2019 Kirch returned to Hawai‘i to teach at UH Mānoa. Kirch has conducted archaeological research across the Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to the Mangareva Islands, including extensive work in Hawai‘i. His 2012 book, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief, integrates Hawaiian oral traditions with evidence obtained from archaeological research.
Jim Kraus
Jim Kraus is a professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu, teaching creative writing, American literature, and surf studies. Currently, he is editor of the Chaminade Literary Review. Jim has a doctorate degree from the University of Hawai’i in American Studies and is a past president of the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council and editor and publisher of Hawai’i Surf & Sea magazine.
Brandy Nālani McDougall
From the ahupuaʻa of Aʻapueo, Maui, Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) is the author of two poetry collections, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai (2008) and Āina Hānau, Birth Land (2023). She is a professor of American Studies specializing in Indigenous Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate for 2023-2025. She lives with her ʻohana in Kalaepōhaku in the ahupuaʻa of Waikīkī on Oʻahu.
Jessica Machado
Jessica Machado, author of Local: A Memoir, is an editor at NBC News. Previously, she was a staff editor at Vox, the Daily Dot, and Rolling Stone. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Cut, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Elle, among others. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“[a] memoir about loneliness, loss, and finding a cultural identity…[that] gorgeously portray[s] the complexity of Machado’s spiral into despair…Machado’s rich descriptions and frank voice make the book worth reading.” ―Kirkus Reviews
Chris McKinney
Chris McKinney is a Korean, Japanese, Scottish American born In Honolulu. He is the author of the Water City trilogy. Book one was named a Best Mystery of 2021 by Publisher's Weekly and a Best Speculative Mystery of 2021 by CrimeReads. Book two, Eventide, Water City, will be released July 2023. Book three, Sunset, Water City will be released December 2023. He has written six other novels: The Tattoo, The Queen of Tears, Bolohead Row, Mililani Mauka, Boi No Good, and Yakudoshi: Age of Calamity. In 2011, Chris was appointed Visiting Distinguished Writer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Over the years, he has won one Elliot Cades Award and seven Kapalapala Pookela Awards
“Combines brilliant worldbuilding and sophisticated plotting . . . McKinney keeps readers guessing about the story’s direction for much of the novel, and sticks the landing with a near-perfect conclusion. Sci-fi thriller fans will anxiously await the series finale.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Colin Moore
Colin Moore is an Associate Professoir in the UH Manoa School of Communications. He is the author of American Imperialism and the State: 1893 – 1921, and a frequent analyst and commentator on political developments in the state of Hawai‘i.
Susanna Moore
Susanna Moore is the author of several novels, including In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, and The Whiteness of Bones, and four books of nonfiction. Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai'i, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is a lecturer at Princeton University. She lives in New York City.
“This immersive, brilliantly subversive historical novel, inspired by a true story, is “set in 1855, follows 25-year-old Sarah Browne as she…heads west to the Minnesota Territory…When the Sioux Uprising of 1862 erupts…Sarah and her children are captured, but protected by the Sioux. Sarah sympathizes with her captors, and slips into the gap between her two worlds” — TIME
Tom Peek
Tom Peek, author Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawai‘i, lived his early life on Grey Cloud Island in the backwaters of Minnesota’s Upper Mississippi River. After hitchhiking by boat through the South Seas, he settled on the island of Hawai‘i three decades ago. There he’s been, among other things, an astronomy and mountain guide on Mauna Kea, an eruption ranger and exhibit writer on Kilauea, and an insider participant in the efforts to protect both sacred volcanoes. An award-winning novelist and acclaimed writing teacher, he lives near Kilauea’s erupting summit crater.
“Mauna Kea is an authentic, eye-opening novel that lifts the veil on the ancient traditions and modern political intrigues that underlie the longstanding controversy over telescopes on Mauna Kea.” – Nelson Ho, Sierra Club leader and longtime Mauna Kea activist.
Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker
Hawai‘i native Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker is surfing columnist at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and author of Surfing Sisterhood Hawai‘i: Wahine Reclaiming the Waves, and Do One Green Thing: Saving the Earth Through Simple, Everyday Choices. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Surfer’s Journal, The Nation, The New York Times, The Green Guide, Sierra, Honolulu Weekly and The Village Voice.
In Hawai‘i, its birthplace, surfing is being renewed by a surge of female power and creativity as girls and women reclaim the sport wherein they traditionally held equal rights with men. In Surfing Sisterhood Hawai‘i, Honolulu native Mindy Pennybacker, a columnist for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, brings waveriding in the islands to life blending Hawaiian legends, historical accounts, and interviews with more than thirty contemporary female surfers of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities.
Noʻu Revilla
Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi poet and educator. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her debut book Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series.
“Poised in the electric space where history and lyric converge, Noʻu Revilla’s Ask the Brindled has new things to say about old things—the work of love, the work of family and community, the work of articulating a self that is ‘shattered & many-named.’ Sustained by a wily variety of forms, the poems’ abiding figure is the shapeshifter, underscoring Revilla’s accomplishment of a complex testimony. With both tenderness and urgency brought to poetry’s reparative labor, Ask the Brindled shows survivance as a gorgeous unfolding of story and polemic, audacity and song.”—Rick Barot
Eric Paul Shaffer
Eric Paul Shaffer is author of seven poetry books, including Even Further West, A Million-Dollar Bill, and Green Leaves: Selected and New Poems. 600 individual poems appear in reviews in America and eleven other countries. Shaffer teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College.
Peter Shaindlin
Peter Shaindlin is a fine art photographer, author, poet and musician living in Honolulu, Hawaii. Born in 1957 in Manhattan, he was raised in Valley Cottage, New York and studied music, art and business at Mannes College and New York University. He highly values his roots in the classical western canons of literature and the performance and visual arts, his interests influenced collectively by a broad spectrum of individuals-- in particular Samuel Johnson, John Clare, Marcel Proust, Bertrand Russell, Lawrence Durrell, John Coltrane and Michel Houllebecq. He is author of The Swans of Pergusa, Citizen Steele, and Ravens, Nights. Peter is COO, Halekulani Hotel.
Don Wallace
Don Wallace, author of a memoir, The French House, has written fiction and non-fiction, journalism, films, reviews and opinion pieces. He is a contributing editor for Honolulu Magazine, and founder-editor of the Hawai‘i Review of Books. https://hawaiireviewofbooks.com
