December 30, 2022–Arts Etc. – The International Examiner

Visual Arts

Savitri Parsons is an artist raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. Drawn to proportion, symmetry, structure and balance, she explores vibrancy and light that creates dynamic contrast with natural elements that helps the viewer see things in a new way. Her work can be seen at Esters Enoteca in Fremont at 3416 Fremont Ave. N. On view now through Feb. 28,2022. Go to www.estersenotecacom for details.

At Soil Artist-Run Gallery you’ll find paintings and sculpture focused on the theme of chairs in the Frontspace:Living Room with work by Connie Fu/Enereph, Sophie Anderson and Anne Marie Wald. In the Backspace:Outwash, ceramics and paintings by Kiki MacInnis. 112 3rd Ave. South in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. On view now through December 31,2022. Go to www.soilart.org for details.

2018 Neddy Award-winning artist Lakshmi Muirhead returns to J. Rinehart Gallery in Pioneer Square with a new body of large-scale work. On view January  5–28,2022. 319 3rd Avenue South. 206-467-4508 or try www.jrinehartgallery.com

“HAVE YOU EATEN?” is a greeting you’ll often be greeted with when entering an Asian household. It is also the name of a group show on view from January 13 – Feb. 2, 2022. “Have You Eaten” is a multi-pronged investigation of the Asian diaspora and its relationship to identity, otherness, and belonging. What does it mean to be from neither here, nor there? To be both of this place yet not completely. At the Slip  in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. 2301 1st Avenue. Go to www.slipgallery.com.

The Seattle Public Library collaborates with local artists each year to highlight programs and services. This group show showcases the illustrations and work of artists the library worked with in 2022. Artists included in this exhibit include Cyrus Huston, Kellie Kawahara-Nimi, Sloane Miller, Gabby Park, Erin Shigaki, Brandon Thomas, Sharon Tu, Adrian Valencia and Jorge Villavicencio. On view at the downtown Central Library Level B Gallery now through January 15, 2023.1000 4th Ave. Go to www.spl.org for details.

People who missed Maggie Jiang’s imaginative re-interpretations of the “I-Ching” most commonly known in the West as the ”Book of Changes” recently exhibited at J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle now have a second chance. Her exhibition entitled “I-Ching Reimagined” is on view at Asia Pacific Cultural Center now through December 26, 2022. Open everyday  from 8am – 5pm (Please knock for entry). 4851 South Tacoma Way in Tacoma,WA  For details, go to [email protected]. Curated by June Sekiguchi.

“Both Sides Now: Stories of Immigration and Cultural Belonging” is a group show featuring artists Tara Tamaribuchi, Rodrigo Valenzuela and Samantha Wall and is curated by Arielle Simmons.  Tamaribuchi’s work is  inspired by Japanese American camouflage workers in U.S. concentration camps during WWII using scraps of kimono fabric. On display now through January 5, 2023. Gallery hours are Wed. – Sat. from 1 – 6pm. Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University’s Lee Center for the Arts is located at 901 – 12th Avenue on campus. 206-296-5360 or try [email protected]

JW Architects in the CIA continues to dedicate a large section of their office to serve as a rotating art installation space, featuring the work of local artists. “Cube Chapel” by Bellevue-based artist Soo Hong will be on view through January,2023. This  multi-media installation is composed of colorful, etched window film paired with video projection and will provide viewers with a unique experience depending on the time of day. 1257 South King St. Hours are 9am – 5pm, M-F.

Seattle artist Junko Yamamoto has a display of her unique hanging fabric sculptures in a public display case now at the 505 Union Station Building. It’s located just past the former CID Starbucks just before one crosses the street over to the Pioneer Square side. The installation can be viewed 24/7. The artist is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery  where she will have a solo show in 2023 as well as Gallery 4 Culture.

“Breathing in a Time of Disaster” by Ching-In Chen and Cassie Mira. Emergent Broadcast System, an improvised choral performance, installation, and speculative writing project gathering Houston and Seattle area collaborators, focuses on the unit of breath in relation to ecological change and community wisdom and survival.  Extended  through  January 13, 2023.    Jack Straw Gallery at 4261 Roosevelt Way NE in Seattle. Hours are Mon. – Fri. from 10am – 5:30pm or by appointment only. 206-634-0919 or go to www.jackstraw.org.

“Shapes of Things to Come” is a group show that points to the future of book art at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. The museum is one of the few in the country to specialize in this unique genre due to its rich holdings from the Cynthia Sears Collection. Includes the work of Kyoko Matsunaga, Katherine Ng, Radha Pandey, Shana Agid, Islam Aly, Mare Blocker, Irene Chan, Malini Gupta, Julie Chen and many, many others. On  view  through February 15, 2023 at the Sherry Grover Gallery located within the museum itself. Open daily and free. 550 Winslow Way East on Bainbridge Island. 206-842-4451 or go to biartmuseum.org.

On view for an extended time is “Painting Deconstructed: Selections from the Northwest Collection” which includes the work of a number of Northwest Asian American artists. Tacoma Art Museum. 1701 Pacific Avenue.  253-272-4358 or  [email protected].

Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds presents  “George Tsutakawa: Works on Paper- The Early Years” which is on view now through March 26, 2023. Includes watercolors, block prints and sketchbooks displayed alongside the work of his contemporaries.190 Sunset Ave. #E in Edmonds. 425-336-4809 or try CascadiaArtMuseum.org.

Seattle Art Museum’s downtown location has the following.  On view is “Pure Amusements: Wealth, Leisure, And Culture in Late Imperial China.”  Seattle Asian Art Museum has the following.  “Boundless: Stories of Asian Art” is an ongoing group show re-imagining of items from the museum’s permanent collection of Asian art. “Beyond The Mountain: Contemporary Chinese Artists on the Classical Forms” is an ongoing exhibit that opens on July 22, 2022. It includes video, photography, painting and kinetic installation exploring classical cultural legacies through the lens of urgent issues of modern life. ”Belonging: Contemporary Asian Art’ is concerned with issues of individuals and their places in changing societies. In the Fuller Garden Court you will find Kenzan Tsutakawa Chinn’s permanent installation “Gather.” Tsutakawa Chinn is a Seattle-raised, New York-based LED light installation artist. Tickets released every Thursday at 10am. Purchase tickets online in advance and save $3. Ticket prices increase if you wait until the day of your visit to purchase so plan ahead and get the best price. Tickets are released online on a monthly rolling basis. Seattle Art Museum is downtown at 1300 First Ave. Seattle Asian Art Museum is at 1400 E. Prospect St. in Volunteer Park. 206-654-3100 or try seattleartmuseum.org.

The Wing Luke Asian Museum. Hours are Fridays through Sundays from 10am – 5pm. Reserving tickets online prior to visit is highly encouraged as it is operating at limited capacity.  Just opened is “We Are Changing the Tide: Community Power for Environmental Justice”. This exhibit looks at BIPOC communities from the Quinault Nation fighting climate change to Duwamish River stewardship to the threat of rising seas on Pacific Island communities to Native Hawaiians opposing military installations and Beacon Hill neighbors fighting airplane noise and pollution. On view  through  April 23, 2023.  “Reorient: Journeys Through Art and Healing” is on view now through May 14, 2023. Opening July 8, 2022 is “Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee”.    “Woven Together: Stories of Burma/Myanmar” on view through November 12, 2022. “Lunar New Year: Altars, Ancestors, Traditions Blessings” on view through January 8, 2023. “Resistors: A Legacy of Movement from The Japanese American Incarceration” is on view now through September 18, 2023. The exhibit leads visitors through a historical narrative beginning with the experience of Japanese American incarcerees in the 1940s and the complicated feelings of shame, anger, fear and varied forces of resistance within the community. Through art, first-person accounts, historical material, and artifacts, this show connects Japanese American resistance movements during WWII era to modern BIPOC justice movements and activism today. Includes the work of Laureen Iida, Kayla Isomura, Paul Kikuchi, Michelle Kumata, Glenn Mitsui, Erin Shigaki and Na Omi Shitani. “Back Home” is a collaboration between Paradice Avenue Souf and The Wing and explores the intersection of Black and Brown communities in Seattle and across the globe. On view now through March 5, 2023.”C-ID Love Letters 3.0” is a collected exhibit of love letters to Chinatown that started from Wing On Wo & Co. and beyond.On view now through December 2022. “Bangladeshi” is a show that explores the art and culture of that ethnically diverse group and will be on view through November 8, 2023.  On going are the following –   “The Heart of Our Journey” is a permanent exhibit dedicated to the Asian Pacific American experience, “I Am Filipino” looks at the story of Filipino Americans”, “Hometown Desi” covers the local South Asian experience and “Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial” looks at the Cambodian America experience and the impact of the Killing fields on that country’s history. There are virtual tours of the museum on weekday mornings. Pre-booking available for private groups. Contact the museum to sign up.  Live virtual tours of the Freeman Hotel on Thursdays at 5pm PDT. Check out what’s in the gift shop with the Museum’s online marketplace. The monthly storytime programs can be watched at www.digitalwingluke.org/programs.

KOBO, a unique shop of arts and crafts from Japan and items made by Northwest artists has two shops in Seattle on Capitol Hill and in the Chinatown/ID/Japantown community downtown. The store has a new instagram shopping account @koboseattleshop or try their website at  koboseattle.com.  KOBO at Higo hours are Wed. – Sat. from 11am – 5pm. The Capitol Hill store is at 814 E. Roy St. and their hours are Tues. – Sat. from 11am to 5pm. Just added – holiday hours on Sundays from 12 – 5pm. KOBO at Higo is at 604 South Jackson St. in the CID.

The Frye Art Museum presents the work of Portland artist Srijon Chowdhury with a solo show entitled “Same Old Song”. The artist creates dreamlike oil paintings that consider the present moment as part of a larger mythology. On view  now through January 15, 2023. 704 Terry Ave. in Seattle.  206-622-9250 or try fryemuseum.org.

The Pacific Bonsai Museum has the following – “A Gallery of Trees: Living Art of Pacific Bonsai Museum through November 5, 2023. “Stone Images XII” through January 8, 2023. Closed for the holidays from December 24 – January 3, 2023.  2515 South 336th St. in Federal Way, WA. Admission is by donation. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am – 4pm. 253-353-7345 or email [email protected].

Childhood’s End Gallery in Olympia has a group show entitled “Impressions” which features new print work by 7 regional printmakers, including the work Yoshiko Yamamoto and others. On view through December, 2022. 222 – 4th Avenue West. 360-943-3724. Hours are Mon. – Sat. from 10am – 6pm and Sundays from 11am – 5pm. For details, go to www.childhoods-end-gallery.com.

The work of Northwest artist Paul Horiuchi is included in a group show on view at Christian Grevstad Gallery Space in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. 312 Occidental Avenue South. M – F, by Appointment only. 206-938-4360 or go to www.grevstad.com. Ongoing.

“everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt” is the title of a group show of moving image installations on view through January 8, 2023. Includes the work of Shirin Neshat and many others. Henry Art Gallery at 15th Avenue NE & NE 41st St. on the edge of the Seattle UW campus. 206-543-2280 or go to www.henryart.org.

“Remembrance – The Legacy of Executive Order 9066 in Washington State” is a permanent exhibit on the third floor of the Washington State Historical Society. Visitors will experience history through photos, art, objects, letters and film. A significant part  of this exhibit was sourced by working with individuals and families who were directly impacted including survivors and their descendants. 1911 Pacific Avenue in Tacoma. 1-888-238-4373.

The Outdoor Sculpture Collection on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham is open and accessible to everyone. This is an outdoor collection of major sculptures from the late 20th century to the present and includes work by Do Ho Suh, Sarah Sze and Isamu Noguchi among others. Get a map from the information booth and explore the campus collection for yourself. Call 360-650-3900.

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at WSU is a new art space for Eastern Washington. Inaugural shows include the following – The museum plans a retrospective exhibition for Eastern Washington artist Keiko Hara for 2022. “Keiko Hara: The Poetics of Space, Four Decades of Paintings” is on view through December 2022.  1535 Wilson Road on the Washington State University campus in Pullman. 509-335-1910 or try [email protected].

Former Bay Area and now Vancouver BC-based photographer Greg Soone gave a talk recently on his new book entitled “Road Work – Street Photographs from the 70s & 80s” Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVms_-NPF-k to. To purchase the book, go to https://roadworkphotos.wordpress.com.

“Start Here” is an exhibition curated by Bryce Kanbara of Graham Gallery that serves as an introduction to the work of four Nisei Japanese Canadian artists born in the latter half of the 1920s. It includes the work of Roy Kiyooka, Kazuo Nakamura, Shizuye Takashima and Takao Tanabe. On view through January 22,2023.At the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria located at 1040 Moss St. in Victoria BC, Canada. 250—384-4171 or try https://aggv.ca/exhibits/start-here/.

The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver BC presents “Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My”, a survey of this American artist’s recent work in drawing and installation employing elements from various communication systems to explore sound as a multidimensional visual, physical and political experience with humor and depth. On view through January 8, 2023.55 Nelson St. 604-681-2700 or try cagvancouver.org.

Vancouver Art Gallery presents a major show of new work by multi-media Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon entitled ”About Time”. There is an art catalog for the show released by Hirmer Books.  On view now through March 5,2023. 750 Hornby St. 604-662-4719 or vanartgallery.bc.ca.

The Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre has the following – Ongoing is “Washi – Japanese Paper Art: connecting cultures, countries and generations. Also on view is an ongoing exhibit on “TAIKEN: Japanese Canadians Since 1877”.  Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre in  Burnaby at 6688 Southoaks Crescent. 604-777-7000  or try nikkeiplace.org.

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene has the following – “Devout Prayers: Korean Paintings of the Joson Dynasty and Beyond” on view through April 30, 2023. “Fit to Print II: Constructing Japanese Modernity in Action and Body” is a deep look at Meiji graphic arts from two local collections. On view through August 6, 2023. 1430 Johnson Lane in Eugene, Oregon. 541-346-3027.

Portland Japanese Garden has the following exhibits – “Kenji Ide: A Poem of Perception” on view through February 20, 2023. Portland Japanese Garden’s final art exhibition of 2022 will be a special one. For this exhibit, esteemed ceramic sculptor Jun Kaneko’s massive abstract sculptures will be placed throughout the garden and his smaller work will be displayed in the Pavilion Gallery. Kaneko is a winner of the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. On view through February 20,2023. 611 SW Kingston Ave.  503-223-1321 or japanesegarden.org.

Japanese American Museum of Oregon is now open in a new space.  Current exhibits include the following –  “Resilence – A Sansei Sense of Legacy” is a group show of eight artists whose work reflects upon the effect of Executive Order 9066 and how it resonated from generation to generation. This group show will be on view through December 22, 2022. Artists include Kristine Aono, Reiki Fuji, Wendy Maruyama, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Tom Nakashima, Roger Shimomura, Judy Shintani and Jerry Takigawa. The show was co-curated by Jerry Takigawa and Gail Enns. Travels on to Washington Historical Society in Tacoma next. Several online exhibits on the history of Japanese Americans in Oregon can also be viewed. 411 NW Flanders. 503-224-1458 or email [email protected].

Portland Chinatown Museum has the following – “Illuminating Time” is a group show of 2022 PCM Artists-in-Residence and their efforts to reach out across time and space to Chinese communities past and present. Includes the work of the following – Portland-based painter & muralist Alex Chiu who incorporates community input and collaboration in the stories he tells. Sam Roxas-Chua who keeps an on-going conversation between poetry, calligraphy and audio field recording to document those who hold crucial knowledge of the Chinese diaspora. Painter and book  artist Shu-Ju Wang who records a history of migration, science and art. Horatio Law serves as Artist Residency Director and show curator. On view now through January 2023.Portland installation artist Roberta Wong has a window installation in memory of Vincent Chin, the Chinese American man killed by two Detroit workers entitled “Vincent”.  Portland Chinatown Museum is located at 127 N.W. Third Ave. 503-224-0008 or email [email protected].

Portland Art Museum has on display, “Forces of Nature: Ecology in Japanese Prints” through December, 2022. 1219 SW Park Ave.  503-226-2811  or try portlandartmuseum.org.

The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco has the following currently on view. Kongkee, animation director and visual artist invites visitors to step into a glowing series of animated vignettes as they follow the journey of the legendary poet Qu Yuan from the past into the future in “Kong Kee: Warring States Cyberpunk”. “Delightful Luxury: The Art of Chinese Lacquer” surveys the museum’s collection from court accessories, scholar’s objects, luxury items and household furniture. Both of these shows open on November 17, 2022.  And coming March 31, 2023 will be an exhibition entitled “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art”.  “Afruz Amighi: My House, My Tomb” is an installation that uses light and shadow to evoke forgotten histories of the Taj Mahal. “Bearing Witness: Selected Works by Chiura Obata” is a retrospective on this important Japanese American Bay Area artist. On view through  January 31, 2023. Outside murals by Channel Miller and Jennifer K. Wofford are visible from Hyde St. Into View: Bernice Bing” is a long overdue retrospective of this important Bay Area Chinese American painter whose works straddles Abstract Expressionism, figuration and Zen calligraphy. As a queer Asian American woman artist, she was a catalyst in the Bay Area cultural scene. On view now through May 1,2023.  In collaboration with the Asian American Women Artists Association, Chinese Culture Center and Kearny Street Workshop, the museum is organizing an open call installation of media and literary work for early 2023.  200 Larkin St.  San Francisco, CA. 415-581-3500. 

The de Young Museum of San Francisco has the following – The exhibition for the late Bay Area figurative artist entitled “Hung Liu: Golden Gate” remains on view through January 8, 2023. 50  Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive in Golden Gate Park.415-750-3600 or try deyoung.famsf.org.

hugo mento Gallery presents “Sumi: Inner Landscapes” by calligrapher Aoi Yamaguchi. Through endless experimentation, the artist explores the depth of the shades and expressive effects that sumi ink can create in the monochromatic linguistic landscape. From the moment the ink touches paper, the ink fuses with paper and ripples out, as if the ink is alive and the paper is breathing. On view through the month of December, 2022. 795 – 22nd St. in San Francisco, CA. [email protected] or call +14155057609. Hours are Wed. – Fridays from 1 – 6pm and weekends from 1 – 5pm or by appointment.

 Berkeley Art Museum/PFA has the following – “Endless Knot: Struggle And Healing in the Buddhist World” on view through June 11, 2023. Curator of the show, Yi Yi Mon Kyo talks about various aspects of the show on February 24 and May 12, 2023. 155 Center St. Berkeley, CA 510-642-0808 or go to [email protected].

“East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art” is the largest of three inaugural Asian American Initiative (AAA) exhibitions opening at the Cantor Arts Center on the Stanford University campus in 2022. Curated by assistant curator of American Art, Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, this historical survey showcases the Cantor’s ever-growing collection of Asian American art, the majority of which was acquired since 2018. Organized thematically and chronologically, the 96 objects presented span a broad range of time (1880-2021), offering a rare opportunity to engage with historic Asian American material. Acquired from a variety of sources, a large percentage comes from the estate of Michael Donald Brown, a Bay Area arts collector and dealer who amassed an unparalleled collection of pre-1950 Asian California art. Artists represented in this collection include Toshio Aoki, Bernice Bing, Chiura Obata, Toshiko Takaezu, Carlos Villa, Martin Wong and Jade Fon Woo. Accompanying the exhibit the Asian American artist performance collective For You were commissioned to create a series of bespoke audio tours. On view through February 12, 2023. 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way on the Stanford University Campus, Stanford,CA. 650-723-4177 or go to https://museum.stanford.edu/eop.

The San Jose Museum of Art has the following – “Formations” by Kelly Akashi is up until May 21, 2023. Akashi is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and in concept. This show encompasses art works made over the past decade and a newly commissioned series in which the artist explores the inherited impact of her family’s imprisonment in a Japanese American incarceration camp during WWII. 110 South Market St. in San Jose, CA. 408-271-6840. Please take note -this traveling exhibit will open locally at the Frye Art Museum June 17 – September 10, 2023.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has the following – “The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art is on view through February 19, 2023. “The Five Directions: Lacquer Through East Asia” is on view through April 16, 2023. “Park Dae Sung: Virtuous Ink and Contemporary Brush” is on view through February 5, 2023.Ongoing is “Ai Weiwei:Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads”. “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” has been delayed until the spring of 2023 and will be on view April 9 – July 16, 2023 at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. LACMA is at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles, CA. 323-857-6000 or go to www.lacma.org.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA explores global arts and cultures with an emphasis on Africa, Asia, the Pacific and indigenous Americas – past and present. Present exhibitions include the following – “Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings” now through March 26, 2023. “Art, Honor & Riducule: Fante Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana” now through February 12, 2023. “Tingatinga” now through January 8, 2023. Ongoing is “Intersections: World Arts Local Lives”. Upcoming exhibitions include the following – “Amir H. Fallah: The Fallacy of Borders” from January 29 – May 14, 2023. “Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance” on view March 26 – July 16, 2023. 308 Charles E. Young Drive N. in Los Angeles, CA. 310-206-5663 or try fowler.ucla.edu.

Japan House Los Angeles has the following – “Life Cycles – A Bamboo Exploration with Tanabe Chikuunsai IV” on view now through January 15, 2023. This exhibition examines the artistic lineage of this family’s tradition of creating bamboo flower baskets and smaller sculptural works and traces the current 4th generation descendant’s forays into large-scale contemporary art works and installations. In the Hollywood & Highland Building on Level 2 & 5 on 6806 Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles. 1-800-516-0565  or try japanhousela.com.

The Japanese American National Museum (JANM) has the following –Ongoing at JANM is “Common Ground – The Heart of Community” which features a WWII Japanese internment camp building.  Ongoing is “The Interactive Story File of Lawson Ichiro Sakai”, an oral history project in which visitors can ask Japanese American elder Sakai any questions they want about his life and past history such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese internment camps, his service as a soldier in WWII. Opening on February 26, 2022 is “Sutra And Bible-Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration”. The exhibit examines the role that religion played in saving the exiled Japanese American community from despair during the war years. This show has been extended to February 19, 2023, the anniversary of the Day of Remembrance.  “BeHere/1942” is a new lens on the Japanese American incarceration using photography by Dorothea Lang and Russell Lee and two augmented-reality installations that explore this historic moment in new ways and allows visitors to participate in that experience. This show has been extended to January 8, 2023. In additional news, the museum has launched an online exhibition on Issei artist Wakaji Matsumoto entitled “Wakaji Matsumoto – An Artist in Two Worlds: Los Angeles and Hiroshima, 1917 – 1944”. This exhibition highlights rarely seen early photographs of Los Angeles prior to WWII and of Hiroshima before the US dropped the atomic bomb all through the lens of photographer Matsumoto. This photographer documented the lives of Japanese immigrant farmers in rural Los Angeles during the early 1900s and created rare images of urban life in Hiroshima prior to the 1945 atomic bombing. Go to janm.org/wakaji-matsumoto to see this photo exhibit. In other news, JANM has launched “Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration”. This monument is planned in three distinct, interlinking elements – a sacred book of names, an online archive as monument and light sculpture as monument. The idea draws on traditions of monuments built historically in America’s internment and concentration camps. Led by USC Ito Center Director Duncan Ryuken Willaims and Project Director Sunyoung Lee, the Ireicho will be on display at the museum until January 8, 2023. The Ireizo is an interactive searchable website monument that will be hosted by the USC Shinso Ito Center in partnership with DENSHO, a Japanese American educational resource that specializes in digital archives and oral histories.  JANM holds its annual Oshogatsu Family Festival to celebrate the new year on Sunday, January 8, 2023 from 11am – 5pm (PT). The event includes free crafts, performances and cultural activities for all ages. Visit janm.org/oshogatsu2023 to RSVP. All events will be livestreamed on their YouTube channel (@janmdotorg) and Instagram (@jamuseum) throughout the day. Admission to all exhibitions is free all day during the festival too. 101 N. Central Ave. in Los Angeles, CA. 213-625-0414.

The Getty Museum currently has online selections from a rarely seen collection of “Japanese American photographs, 1920-1940” recently acquired by the museum. Try www.getty.edu.

The USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA has the following –   “Crossroads – Exploring the Silk Road” opens October 22, 2021. This new permanent exhibit tells the story of centuries of cultural exchange stimulated by the movement of travelers and goods along the ancient trade route. “After Modernism: Through the Lens of Wayne Thom” on view now through January 22, 2023. Thom was one of Southern California’s prominent architectural photographers.  “Global Asia’s: Contemporary Asian And Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer & the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation” comes to the museum from March – June, 2023. Their online exhibit is “Nature of the Beast: Animals in Japanese Paintings and Prints”. 2680 N. Los Robles Ave.  in Pasadena, CA.  626-787-2680 or [email protected].

The Chinese American Museum presents “Origins: The Birth and Rise of Chinese American Communities” and a permanent exhibit of the Sun Wing Wo General Store and Herb Shop. 425 North Los Angeles St. 213-485-8567 or go to camla.org.

The San Diego Museum of Art has the following – Ongoing is a show of Arts of South and Southeast Asia from the first to the 19th century AD. 1460 El Prado,  Balboa Park in San Diego.

The Honolulu Museum of Art presents the following – A show of Japanese woodblock prints is ongoing. “Navigating a Minefield: A Manga Depiction of Japanese Americans in the Second World War” is on view through March 5, 2023. 900 South Beretania St. 808-532-8700  or try honolulumuseum.org.

The Denver Art Museum presents “Her Brush: Japanese Women Artists from the Fong-Johnson Collection” which includes more than 100 works of painting, calligraphy and ceramics from the 1600s to 1900s Japan, many on view for the first time. The exhibition chronicles the struggles women in Japan had to undergo in order to express themselves in art and the results they achieved despite restrictions. On view through May 13, 2023. Also opening on December 18, 2022 and remaining on view through May 28, 2023 is “Rugged Beauty: Antique Carpets from Western Asia” which explores the craftsmanship of carpet weaving from that region for over six centuries. 100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway in Denver, CO. 720-865-5000 or www.deverartmuseum.org.

The Dallas Museum of Art presents the following –  “The Keir Collection of Islamic Art” is on view through December 31, 2022. 1717 North Harwood St.  214-922-1200.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has the following –  “Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Art Rocks” through May 3, 2023. And coming up is “Hokusai: Inspiration & Influence” March 26 – July 16, 2023. 465 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA. 617-267-9300 or go to mfa.org.

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA has the following ongoing exhibits – “South Asian Art”, “Double Happiness Celebration in Chinese Art”, “Japanese Art”, “Japanomania! Japanese Art Goes Global” and finally “Anila Quayyum Agha: All the Flowers Are For Me”. This Pakistani American artist creates precise, stylized floral forms to make a sculptural chamber of light and shadow. Her effort creates a sense of how women can reclaim and safely open up private space to invite others. “Power and Perspective: Early Photography in China” remains on view through April 2, 2023. Coming up are “Spirits: Tsherin Sherpa with Robert Beer” on view from February 4 – May 29, 2023 and “Gu Wenda:United Nations” from April 11 – November 5, 2023. 61 Essex St. in Salem, MA 816-745-4876 or go to pem.org.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art has the following –   “The Prints of Maki Haku: Prints from the Kimm-Grofferman Collection” on view through April 9, 2023. “20 Dances: Japanese Calligraphy Then And Now” is on view through April 9, 2023.  2400 Third Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 888-642-2787.

The Walker Art Center has the following –  “Paul Chan: Breathers” on view now through April 22, 2023. And a Pacita Abid retrospective planned for sometime in 2023. 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN. 612-375-7600 or try [email protected].

The Art Institute of Chicago has the following – “Kingfisher Headdresses from China” is on view through May 21, 2023. “Recollections of Tokyo 1923-1945” is on view through September 25, 2023. Includes modern Japanese printmakers memories of Tokyo before and after WWII.  111  South Michigan Ave./159 E.  Monroe. Chicago, ILL. 312-443-3600.

The Cleveland Art Museum has the following on view –   On view through March 5, 2023 is “Text and Image in Southern Asia.  Opening December 11, 2022 and remaining on view through February 26, 2023 is “China Through the Magnifying Glass: Masterpieces in Miniature & Detail”. Opening June 11, 2023 and remaining on view through September 10, 2023 is “A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur.” The exhibit “Modern Japan” is on view through April 2, 2023. 11150 East Blvd. Cleveland, Ohio. 216 – 421- 7350 or go to https://www.clevelandart.org.

“Ink & Brush: The Beauty & Spirit of Japanese Calligraphy” is on view through April 2023. Also ongoing is “Collection Highlight: Ceremonial Teahouse.” Philadelphia Museum of Art.2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy. 215-763-8100 or  try www.philamuseum.org.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum has the following – “Traditions of Japanese Art” on view through October 8, 2023. 4525 Oak St. Kansas City, MO. 816-751-1278 or try www.nelson-atkins.org.

The Newark Museum has an ongoing exhibit entitled “From Meiji to Modern: Japanese Art Goes Global- The Art of Japan”. 49 Washington St., Newark, New Jersey. 973-596-6550 or try  www.newarkmuseum.org.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has the following – “Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection” reveals itself to be more than just clothing but a silk canvas of wearable art. A terrific collection on view through February 20, 2023.  “Celebrating the Year of the Tiger” through January 17, 2023. “Samurai Splendor – Sword Fittings from Edo Japan” is ongoing. 1000 Fifth Ave.  212-535-7710. Go to https://www.metmuseum.org.

Asia Society Museum has the following – These two shows now extended through December 31, 2022. “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity” includes 19 works by seven artists born in China in the 1980s and reflects the dramatic economical, political and cultural shifts these artists have all experienced in their lifetimes.  “Visionary Legacies: A Tribute to Harold J. Newman” celebrates artwork that Newman and his wife donated to the Asia Society Museum.   725 Park Ave. in New York City.212-327-9721 or try www.asiasociety.org.

Ippodo Gallery has the following –   “Susumu Shingu- Sculpting With Wind” is the first solo exhibition in New York for this renowned kinetic sculptor. Through December 29, 2022. 32 E. 67th St., 3rd Floor. New York City. +1-(212) 967-4899  or [email protected]. 

The Rubin Museum of Art announces the 2022 exhibition “Healing Practices: Stories From Himalayan Americans” which highlights the diverse ways that Tibetan Buddhist artworks and practices have served as roadmaps to well-being. The exhibition juxtaposes objects from the museum’s collection with stories from Himalayan Americans, revealing the many ways these living traditions are transformed and adopted for today’s world. On view through January 16,2023. This exhibition was developed in collaboration with a Himalayan American and Asian American Community Advisory Group which includes New York tri-state area and DC artists, medical professionals, spiritual leaders, activists, educators and art therapists interested in the intersection between art, healing, and activism. A new podcast premieres on June 8, 2021 entitled “Awaken” hosted by musician/composer Laurie Anderson. It features stories of transformation by Aparna Nancheria, Alok Vaid-Menon, Tara Branch and more.  Get the podcast on RubinMuseum.org/awakenPOD and other major podcast platforms. Mandala Lab” is the Museum’s new interactive space for social, emotional and ethical healing. Designed by Peterson Rich Office, it invites visitors to participate in five unique experiences inspired by a Tibetan Buddhist mandala. Through October 1, 2031.  “Gateway to Himalayan Art” remains on view through June 5, 2023. “Journey Through Himalayan Art” remains on view through January 8, 2024.”150 West 17th St. in New York City. 212-620-5000 or go to rubinmuseum.org.

The Brooklyn Museum presents artist Oscar yi Hou’s ”East of sun, west of moon”. It features work by this UOVO Prize-winner. The exhibit highlights queer Asian American subjects and illuminates the intersectional identities of the artist and his friends. On  view through June 1, 2023. 200 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York.718-638-5000 or try https://www.brooklynmuseum.org.

“With A Single Step – Stories in The Making of America” is on view through December 31, 2023. A presentation of the diverse layers of the Chinese American experience while examining America’s journey as a nation of immigrants. The Museum of  Chinese in America. 215 Centre St. New York City. +1-855-955-MOCA  or [email protected]

The Noguchi Museum presents “Noguchi Subscapes” on view through May 7, 2023. These installations reveal his interest in the unseen and hidden.   Also on view is a group show entitled “In Praise of Caves: Organic Architecture Projects from Mexico” by Lazo, Goeritz, O’Gorman and Senosiain on view October 19, 2022 – February 26, 2023. 9-01 33rd Road. Long Island City, New York. 718-204-7088 or  [email protected].

New York City-based Joan B. Mirviss LTD has on view currently “Selected Artworks”, a group  show culled from their collection of Japanese art in the fields of ceramics, prints and paintings. “Eternal Currents” is the first  solo exhibition outside Japan for ceramic artist Hayashi Kaku now on view through January 13, 2023. Hours are M-F from 11am – 6pm/39 E. 78th St. #401 in New York City. 212-799-4021  or [email protected]

The Dai ichi Arts Gallery presents a group show of the gallery’s Japanese ceramic artists on view through January 20, 2023.18 E. 64th St. – Ste. 1F in New York City. +212-230-1680. Go to daichiarts.com for details.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art has the following – “Underdogs and Antiheroes: Japanese Prints from the Moskowitz Collection on view through January 29, 2023. “Meeting Tessai: Modern Japanese Art from the Cowles Collection on view through February 18, 2023. Tessai was both a modern Japanese painter and a traditional brush painter inspired by Chinese Ming 

And Ching examples. Includes work by Tessai’s mentor, the Buddhist nun Rengetsu and other examples of modern Japanese painting. The “Feathered Ink” show features examples of how Japanese artists experimented on how to depict Asian subjects of birds using different brush techniques. On view through  January 29, 2023.  “Rinpa: Creativity Across Time and Space” is up through February 5, 2023. “Ancient Yemen: Incense, Art & Tradition”has just opened. “A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur” opens November 19, 2022 and remains on view through May 14, 2023. 1050 Independence Ave. S.W. in  Washington D.C. 202-633-1000.

The Chinese American Museum has opened in Washington DC. It’s the only museum in the nation’s capitol dedicated to the Chinese American story – its history, culture and voice. Currently on view is “Taoism: Pursuing Harmony Between Human and Nature” which opened November 3, 2022. The museum had an exhibit tour of their exhibition “Golden Threads – Chinese Opera in America” which is now available on you tube for viewing. Go to www.chineseamericanmuseum.org for details. 1218 – 16th St. NW. 202-838-3180.

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery presents the first biographical exhibition dedicated to the career of Maya Lin – architect, sculptor, environmentalist and designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “One Life- Maya Lin” remains on view through April 16, 2023. 8th & G streets NW in Washington D.C. Open daily from 11:30am – 7pm. Go to npg.si.edu for details.

The New Orleans Museum of Art has the following – “Katherine Choy: Radical Potter in 1950s New Orleans” is on view through April 23, 2023. This is the first monographic review of this artist whose work was celebrated by the 1950s craft world before her sudden death. Her early pots show inspiration from Asian clay traditions but expanded to include aggressively large asymmetrical forms with glazes that had intentionally left parts of the raw clay exposed.   One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana. 504-658-4100.

The Crow Museum of Asian Art currently has on view –  An ongoing exhibit entitled “Fierce Loyalty: A Samurai Complete”. “Rare Earth: The Art and Science of Chinese Stones through February 28, 2023. “CAST: Molding a New Museum for UT Dallas” on view through March 5, 2023. “Phoenix Rising: Xu Bing and the Art of Resistance” on view through March 5, 2023. 2010 Flora St. in Dallas, TX. 214-979-6440  or try crowcollection.org.

“Creative Splendor: Japanese Bamboo Baskets from the Thoma Collection” is on view through January 2, 2024 at the San Antonio Museum of Art. 200 W. Jones Avenue in San Antonio, Texas. 210-978-8100  or try samuseum.org.

Yoko Ikeda’s photography gets a second solo exhibition at IBASHO Gallery in Antwerp. She transforms mundane scenes of the everyday into poetic, ephemeral images. The show coincides with the launch of her new book entitled “Contrepoint” (IBASHO/ the (M) editions). On view through January 22, 2023.  Tolstraa+67,2000 Antwerp, Belgium. +32(0)3212028. Try [email protected]

“Wabi-Sabi: Japanese Aesthetics in Photography and Ceramics” is on view through January 15, 2023. Japan Museum SieboldHuis at   Rapenburg 19, 2311 GE Leiden, The Netherlands. +31(0)71-5125539 or wwwsieboldhuis.org/en/exhibitions/.

The first major retrospective of artist Lee Ufan since 2005 is at Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art where it will be on view from December 13, 2022 – February 12, 2023. Opening in January 2023 will be “Ming to Ching: Chinese Painting, Calligraphy and Seal Carving in the Bai Joteki Collection”. 1-1-1 Wakinohama Kaigan-dori, Chuo-Ku, Kobe,Japan. 078-262-0901 or artm.pref.hyogo.jp.  

The Shoto Museum of Art presents an exhibit entitled “Beads in the World- National Museum of Ethnology Collection” through January 15, 2023. 2-14-14 Shoto, Shibuya-ku,Tokyo, Japan. +91(3)3465-9421 or try shoto-museum.ip.

Ginza Graphic Gallery has the following –  “Aquira Uno Exhibition” is on view from December 8, 2022 – January 31, 2023.  DNP Ginza Building 1F/B1  7-2 Ginza, 7-Chome, Chuo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan. 03-3571-5206  or try dnpfcp.jp.

Multi-disciplinary artist Shinro Ohtake gets his first major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art in 16 years. The show contains 500 smaller exhibits divided into seven conceptual themes that span his whole career. On view through February 5, 2023. 3-1 Kitanomaru Koen, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. Go to www.kakeninagawa.com/ohtakeshinroten/.

Japanese photographer Rika Noguchi explores the laws of our universe through images of nature, man-made objects and cityscapes that span three decades of her career. On view through January 22, 2023.Tokyo Photographic Museum at Yebisu Garden Place, 1-13-3 Mita Meguro-ku, Tokyo. Go to topmuseum.jp/contents/exhibition/index-4270.html.

At the Mori Arts Center – On view is “Togashi Yoshihiro – Puzzle” on view through January 9, 2023. This is a major survey of this Japanese manga artist whose most successful genres have been in science fiction and the occult. He is know for his manga series “Yu Yu Hakusho” and “Hunter x Hunter”. He is married to Naoko Takeuchi, a fellow manga artist and creator of the famous “Sailor Moon” series. In Tokyo, Minato City, Roppongi, 6 Chome-10-1, Roppongi Hills, Japan. +8150-5541-8600.

“Visitors” is the title of a two person show with Christian Hidaka and Takeshi Murata, artists of Japanese descent raised in English-speaking cultures. Hidaka, based in London, draws parallels between painting and theatre. Chicago-born Murata, now based in L.A., specializes in digital art using video and CGI technology. At Maison Hermes Le Forum in Tokyo’s Ginza on view through January 31, 2023. 5-4-1 Ginza, Chuo-ku in Tokyo. Go to www.hermes.com/jp/ja/story/maison-ginza/forum/221021/.

Tokyo National Museum presents “The Saint Kuya and Rokuharamitsuji Temple”,an exhibit that brings together masterpieces of Buddhist sculpture from the Heian and Kamakura periods. Set for  March 1–May 8, 2023. 13-9 Ueno Park,Taito – Ku, Tokyo. 110-8712  or www.tnm.jp.

The digital art collective known as teamLab collaborate with the Galaxy Store to turn their enchanted forest into an underwater fantasy entiled “Catching and Collecting in the Sea of Life” This piece is an interactive one where visitors can use smartphones to catch, study and release the sea creatures they encounter in this space. On view through December 29, 2022. Galaxy Harajuku is at 1-8-9 Jingumae, Shibuya in Tokyo. Go to www.teamlab.art/e/collecting-seaoflife/ for details.

Waseda University’s Haruki Murakami Library invites bibliophiles to look at books by Murakami Haruki and other Japanese authors that have been adapted for readers overseas and perceive how the process of translation has opened up literature to the world. On view through March 26, 2023. 1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku in Tokyo. Wwwwasedajp/culture/wihl/other-en/3110. 

The Yamatane Museum presents “Depicting Japanese Landscapes: From Utagawa Hiroshige to Tabuchi Toshio” is on view from December 10, 2022 – Feb. 26, 2023. KS Bldg. 1 F,2 Sambancho, Chiyoda Ku, Tokyo. 102-0075.  81+3-5777-8600 or try www.yamatane-museum.jp/english.

Ota Memorial Museum of Art presents “Treasures from Chishakuin Temple in Kyoto” which includes gold leaf screen paintings by Hasegawa Tohaku. Through Jan. 22, 2023. 1-10-10 Jingumae,Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo. 150-0001. 03-3403-0880 or  www.ukiyoe-ota-muse.jp.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum has the following – “Okamoto Taro: A Retrospective” now through Dec. 28, 2022. “Ueno Artist Project 2022: Beauty Nurtured by The Tale of Genji- It is Fate That Brings Us together” on view through Jan. 6, 2023. “The Tale of Genji & Edo Culture” on view through Jan. 6, 2023.  Ueno Park. 8-36 Ueno Koen  Tokyo  110-0007, Japan. Try ww.tobikan.jp/en/.

Kyoto National Museum presents  “Happy New Year!: Celebrating the Year of the Rabbit” on view Jan. 2 – 29, 2023. 527 Chayacho Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto,Japan. www.kyohaku.go.jp/eng/index.html.

“In “kalpanaka aashiyana”, New Delhi-based artist Bhartti Verna depicts what she refers to as “mystical landscapes” of her dreams and imagination. Repra Art Private Ltd 703 at Chiranjiv Tower 43, Nehru Place in New Delhi. On view now through December, 2022. For details, try [email protected]

 “Yayoi Kusama: The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended Into the Heavens” is an installation on view through April 2023.  On going is an installation by Chihara Shiota entitled “Absence Embodied.” Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. North Terrace, Adelaine SA 5000, Australia. +61 8 8207 7000 or try https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au.

The National Gallery of Australia based in Canberra is a new museum that houses the most important collection of Australian Aboriginal art as well as islander art from the Torres Strait Region. Parkes Pl. E., Parkes ACT 2600, Canberra, Australia. +61262406411 or try [email protected].

Japanese historian Meher McArthur has curated a touring group exhibit entitled “Washi Transformed: New Expressions In Japanese Paper” which features the work of nine contemporary Japanese artists which include Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida. The exhibit tours over 6 cities across the United States beginning in October of 2021.The lone West Coast date thus far is at Mingei International Museum in San Diego, CA, now through January 7, 2024. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has a new 120-foot-long glass mosaic entitled “A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart Unto the Universe” (2022). It’s in the Madison Concourse of New York’s MTA Long Island Railroad Terminal. Kusama now in Tokyo, lived in New York City from 1958 – 1975. She said her mural was inspired by the depiction of many different characters coming and going.

Aperture and Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York, in partnership with the 7/G Foundation has announced Pao Houa Her as recipient of the 2023-24 Next Step Award. The award supports US-based artists at critical junctures in their artistic development. Her’s photography highlights the shared experience of the Hmong community both abroad and as immigrants in the US. The artist says, “My work attempts to break down the larger story of what it means to be Hmong American into discrete moments in time. I see each small moment, each new portrait, as a kind of poetic note in a broader, diffuse narrative. My most recent work moves into even more conceptual space, using constructed/staged elements to play with themes of geography and longing.”

Pinaree Sanpitak is a Thai artist whose work centers on objects inspired by the female form. Already the recipient of two exhibitions and an appearance at the Venice Biennale, her most recent work will be at Art Basel Miami Beach. The work includes five new paintings and 119 sculptures all inspired by the female body. She works in painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, and ceramics and her sculptures often use paper, usually made from mulberry bark.

Performing Arts

There will be a Lunar New Year Celebration Show on Tuesday, January 17, 2023 at 2pm at the Seattle Central Library’s Microsoft Auditorium. The program will celebrate the year of the rabbit with Chinese dance, music and a variety of performing arts. Co-presented by Seattle Sunshine Performing Arts Group. 1000 Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. Go to www.spl.org/Calendar for details.

Young pianist Jason Nam who won the Platinum Prize at the 2022 Canadian International Music Competition and the gold medal at the 2020 Aloha International Piano Competition will join the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. The rest of the program includes works by Chavez, de Falla and Kodaly.The orchestra is conducted by Geoffrey Larson. Set for Sunday, January 29, 2023 at Town Hall Seattle. 1119 – 8th Ave. 206-652-4255 or try townhallseattle.org.

Teatro ZinZanni returns to Seattle with a new show entitled “Coming Home” in SODO Park now through February 19, 2023. The show features a cast of veteran circus performers, musicians and comedians with a catered dinner courtesy of Herbal Feast. Violinist Anna Nordmoe is in the orchestra and performs some aerial turns on the silks as well. 3200 1st Ave. S. #100. 206-932-4717 or try  zinzanni.com/seattle.

Verlaine & McCann present their 16th season of their holiday spectacle “Land of the Sweets: The Burlesque Nutcracker” now through December 30, 2022 with shows at 7:30pm nightly at The Triple Door in downtown Seattle. Vivian Tam, aerialist will be in the cast alongside a host of ballet dancers.216 Union St. 866-973-9612  or try tickets.thetripledoor.net.

Come celebrate Degenerate Art Ensemble’s new Downtown Studio at the Art Bank. The event will feature a new short performance film collaboration between Haruko Nishimura and video artists Leo Mayberry and Ian Lucero, costume designers Willow Fox and Wyly Astley with music by Joshua Kohl commissioned by the Mayors Office of Arts and Culture. Degenerate Art Ensemble will present excerpts from their latest performance work-in-progress “Anima Mundi”, an interdisciplinary work that challenges the amnesia that contemporary human beings have in their connection to the rest of the natural world and to each other. Attendees are asked to bring an offering to the event such as blankets, new socks and underwear, gloves, hats, scarves or other items that will help keep people in the neighborhood warm. On Saturday, January 14. 2023 at 6pm. At the Art Bank located at  810 3rd Ave. Tickets for sale on a sliding scale from $10-50. For tickets, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/463798352357. DAE will do another film screening and performance at the Art Bank on January 14, 2023 at 6pm.

STG Productions has the following performers lined up to appear at the Moore Theatre. Rescheduled from a previous date is the debut performance of “YAMATO! The Drummers of Japan” set for February 16, 2023 at 7:30pm (PT). 1932 2nd Avenue in downtown Seattle. Go to stgpresents.org for details.

The Meany Center for the Performing Arts has the following acts for their fall 2022/2023 season. The international drumming phenomenon known as KODO return to Seattle from Japan on their “One Earth Tour: Tsuzumi”. The will perform two commissioned works from composer Maki Ishii. Ishii as well as other signature works from their repertory. January 27 & 28, 2023 at 8pm. Ragamala Dance Company directed by mother-daughters Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy & Aswini Ramasway perform “Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim” February 9 – 11, 2023 at 8pm. Try [email protected] or call 206-543-4880. Meany Hall is located on the west edge of the UW campus just minutes from the NE 45th Street I5 exit.

On The Boards has announced their 2022-2023 season of performing arts on the cutting edge. On April 13-16, 2023, catch Christopher Morgan’s “Native Intelligence/Innate Intelligence’ which incorporates dance, Hawaiian chant & percussion, original compositions for cello and multimedia scenic design coverage in this examination of ancestry, home and belonging. On April 27 – May 7, 2023, choreographer/dancer Ayako Nakame presents “Freeway Dance”. In a garden installation, the dancer asks people to describe their first moment of dancing and reconstructs these movements with her own body. On May 18 – 21, 2023, Takahiro Yamamoto presents “NOTHINGBEING”, an investigation of ways to embody the presence of nothingness and being, holding spaces we could easily dismiss and considering possibilities for the unfiltered self. 100 W. Roy St. 206-217-9886 or go to ontheboards.org.

The Village Theatre presents the Rogers & Hammerstein’s musical “Cinderella” as directed by Desdemona Chiang. Cast includes Keola Kapulani Holt, Ays Garcia, Kawika Huston, Lisa Kwak, Mia Mooko, Fune Tautala and others. With  a full orchestra. Performances now  at the Issaquah Theatre through December 30, 2022 and January 6 – 29, 2023 in the Everett Theatre. 425-392-2202 or  [email protected]

Catch the Peking Acrobats featuring The Shanghai Circus in a dazzling show of balance defying gravity as they return to Tacoma for a January 22, 2023 show at 2pm. Pantages Theatre at 901 Broadway. [email protected] or call  253-346-1721.

Seattle Opera has announced the line-up for their upcoming season. Some highlights include the following – Yonghoon Lee has the starring role as Samson in the Seattle Opera production of “Samson & Delilah” set for January 20 & 22, 2023. The world premiere of an adaptation of Afghani author Khaled Hosseini’s award-winning novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” takes place Feb. 25 & 26, March 3,5,8 & 11, 2023. Directed by Afghan filmmaker Roya Sadat. Rame Lahaj and Duke Kim share the role of Alfredo in “La Traviata” set for May 6,7,10,13,14 & 19, 2023. Samoan tenor Amitai Pati makes his Seattle Opera  debut as Nemorino in “L’elisir d’amore” through August  20, 2022. Seattle Opera perfroms out of McCaw Hall at 321 Mercer St. 206-389-7676 or try [email protected].

The Seattle Symphony has released details of their 2022/2023  season. Some highlights include the following – This year’s guest conductor Sunny Xia will also be conducting a number of free “Community Concerts” with Seattle Symphony in 2023 – March 3 at Renton Ikea Performing Arts Center, April 21 at 7pm – “Dear Humanity” at S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, May 18, “The Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop” at S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, Benaroya Hall and June 7 – “Side-by-Side Concert with Yakima Music en Accion at S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, Benaroya Hall.   Dec. 28, 29 and 30, 2022 are special performances of “Beethoven Symphony No. 9” with tenor Nicholas Phan joining the singers. Phan also performs with other singers on Dec. 31, 2022 in a “New Year’s Eve Concert, Coundown & Celebration.” January 6, 2023 in the Recital Series, you can catch Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho. From Japan, catch the young passionate pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii as he “Plays Rachmainov” January 26 and 28. And January 29 brings the annual “Celebrate Asia” special program with an all-star cast of gifted performers both Asian and Asian American. February 16 and 18, virtuoso violinist Arabella Steinbacher performs Mendelssohn with Tianyi Lu conducting. March 23 and 25 brings conductor Yue Bao with Jan Vogler on cello in a concert entitled “Three Continents Cello Concert. March 30, April 1 and April 2, guest conductor Xian Zhang does “Carmina Burana”. Sunny Xia conducts “The Peasant Prince” as part of the April 1, 2023 “Family Concerts Series”. Based on the true story of Li Cunxin as recounted in the memoir, “Mao’s Last Dancer.” World-renowned violinist Midori does a recital on April 12. Sunny Xia conducts “Dances Around The World” as part of the “Family Concert Series” on June 10. Celebrate summer in a concert featuring a slack key guitarist from Hawai’i entitled “Hawaiian Summer Holiday with Makana” set for July 12, 2023. Visit seattlesymphony.org for complete information. Or call 206-215-4747.

The 5th Avenue Theatre’s Educational Touring Company’s Northwest Bookshelf will be touring the Pacific Northwest in the Spring of 2023. It will feature musical theater adaptations of “Alaska’s Three Pigs’, “A Normal Turtle”, “Sonya’s Chickens”, “Narwhal:Unicorn of the Sea” and “Super Narwhal & Jelly Jot”. It will tour schools and community centers across Washington State from Febrary to May 2023. This season’s touring company has an ensemble cast featuring Keoni Dilay, Ays Garcia, Keola Kapulani Holt, Kawika Huston and swing Madison Willis. Directed by Jimmy Shields with music direction by Claire Marx.  Recommended fro kindergarten to 5th grade. Visit https://www.5thavenue.org/education/schools/educational:touring-company/ to book a show. For more information on 5th Avenue Theatre, try www.5thavenue.org.

“Bound” is a contemporary opera on the life of a Vietnamese refugee living in America. The story centers on the eleventh grade daughter of two Vietnamese immigrants who are divorced and how she must provide financially for the family while at the same time being sister and parents to her siblings and maintaining her studies. The libretto is by Bao-long Chu and the music is by Huang Rao. Desdemona Chiang directs with Ruo, in his Seattle debut, serving as conductor as well. The cast includes Karen Vuong, Nina Yoshida Nelsen and Daniel Klein. A Seattle Opera production set for June 9 – 18, 2023 at Tagney Jones Hall at the Opera Center. A special “teens only” performance is set for Friday, June 16, 2023 at 7:30PM. (PT). If you are interested in bringing a group to this event, email [email protected]opera.org. For regular tickets, call 206-389-7676 or email [email protected] 

Sound Theatre has announced their Sweet 16 Anniversary Season  which includes two world premieres, the Seattle premiere of a Pulitzer-winning Broadway play and a playwright-in-residence’s latest work in development. One of their many highlights is the World Premiere of Aimee Chou’s “Autocorrect Thinks I’m Dead” set for September 2023 at 12th Ave. Arts in bilingual ASL-English with captions. The plot revolves around three deaf friends who move into an old house during the centennial anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell’s 1922 death. For details on their upcoming season, go to [email protected].

“The Theory of Everything” by Thai American playwright Prince Gomolvilas raises the question of “What does it mean to be Asian in North America?” The story centers on three generations from North America, the Philippines, Japan, China and Thailand, who all struggle  to find their identities as immigrants. The play gets its Canadian premiere at The Roundhouse from January 9 – 12, 2023. Tickets  in advance from www.vact.ca.

Miki Yamada is a New York-based jazz pianist from Kobe, Japan. She lived in the Big Apple since 2012. In 2015, she was selected to participate in “Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead”, an intensive composition residency at the Kennedy Center. During the pandemic, she developed a successful in-home live-streaming weekly concert series called “Miki’s Mood” which featured a who’s who of NYC talent.  Her most recent release is “Stairway to the Stars” (Outside In Music). She brings her quartet to the Northwest featuring noted saxophonist Mark Turner on February 14, 2023 at 7pm at Hermann’s Jazz Club at 753 View St. in Victoria, BC Canada. Presented by Victoria Society. Go to https://www.rmts.bc.ca/production-detail-pages/2023/miki-yamanaka-quartet/ for details.

A Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Zee Zee Theatre co-production in association with rice & beans theatre present the play “My Little Tomato” written by Rick Tae and co-directed by Derek Chan and Cameron Mackenzie. Dramaturgy by Joanna Garfinkel.In this surreal rom-com, a Chinese Canadian kindergarten teacher inherits his family’s farm and vows to continue it to honor his family name. Unlucky in personal relationships, he transfers his love to his tomatoes. On stage from March 9 – 19, 2023.. At The Cultch located at 1895 Venables St. in Vancouver BC, Canada. 604-251-1361 or go to thecultch.com.

A new opera performed on Toronto’s waterfront entitled “Dragon’s Tale” gets its world premier June 15 – 18, 2023. Past and present converge as the story travels from the exile of a Chinese poet and politician in the Chu Kingdom to a Chinese Canadian daughter and her father in present-day Toronto who struggle to maintain their relationship. Composed by Chan Ka Nin and playwright and librettist Mark Brownell and directed by Tapestry Opera’s Artistic Director, Michael Hidetoshi Mori. For details try, https:/tapestryopera.com/performances/dragons-tale/. Tickets go on sale soon. Harbourfront Centre Theatre at 231 Queens Quay W. in Toronto Ontario, Canada.

Freehold Theatre Lab/Studio now located in the CID continues their classes in various aspects of the theatre both virtual and in-person.   For a list of current classes, go to freeholdtheatre.org for details or call 206-595-1927.

Go to Nonsequiter’s website to listen to free links by local musicians performing original music at waywardmusic.org.  Carol J. Levin on electric harp engages in a series of “Duo Improvisations” with Susie Kozawa who plays various sound objects. Jackie An performs music for violin and electronics. Sovan is an ambient music duo featuring songwriter Tomo Nakayama and film composer Jeramy Koepping. Classically trained pianist and designer Tiffany Lin plays a piano program of originals in this series. Local sound artist Susie Kozawa has a piece she did invoking the space at the Chapel. Percussionist/composer Paul Kikuchi explores new music. 

Choreographer/dancer/singer Haruko Crow Nishimura performs a new vocal piece. Other performers include Leanna Keith, Nordra, Ahmed Yousefbeigi, Mother Tongue with Angelina Baldoz, trumpeter Cuong Vu and drummer Ted Poor, the wife/husband classical duo of Melia Watras and Michael Jinsoo Lim, Joshua Limanjaya Lim, Rahikka & James Lee, Kaoru Suzuki and Chris Icasiano with more to follow. The Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center has re-opened and is now booking again various kinds of adventurous/experimental music. Go to waywardmusic.org for details.

Japanese conductor Yuji Yuasa has died at the age of 77. Yuasa worked as a former assistant to Seiji Ozawa and has been one of the most respected and beloved professors at Vienna Music University. He had a reputation in Japan as a teacher who systematically analyzed the essence of traditional conducting.

A new opera about an Asian American rock band entitled “Slanted: An American Rock Opera” makes its debut at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis March 16 – 18, 2023 along side two other new operas “Cook Shack” and “Madison Lodge” at Catherine B. Berges Theatre at St. Louis Center of Creative Arts. OTSL’s New Works Collective is the first initiative that invites open submissions from across the country and allows its community to independently select projects for future development. Tickets on sale at ExperienceOpera.org/NWC.

The Thai composer Somtow Sucharitkul will be creating an opera based on Ed Wood’s infamous “Plan 9 From Outer Space” which is often considered one of the world’s worst films. The composer will release a suite from the opera in the fall of 2023 before a fall premiere comes in 2024. Torsten Neumann, the director of the Oldenburg Film Festival will produce. Sucharitkul is the Artistic Director of Opera Slam and was a music consultant for the highly praised film “Tar”.

Conductor Xu Zhong has been awarded the Officierde l’Ordre des ARTS et des Lettres by the French government. It’s his second honor. In 2010 he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre et des Lettres.

Film & Media

The Grand Illusion Cinema has the following. See Toshiro Mifune strut through a terror-stricken village of corruption as a masterless samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s classic “Yojimbo” in 35mm. Screens January 6, 2023 at 7:30pm. 1402 NE 50th St. in Seattle’s University District. Try [email protected]

Northwest Film Forum screens the following –The Sundance Film Festival Shorts Tour 2022” lands in Seattle with an in-person only screening on January 4, 5, 6 at 7:30pm, January 7 & 8 at 4:30pm and January 11 & 12, 2023 at 7:30pm. These award-winning shorts are always a crowd favorite at Sundance. Included in this package is “Makassar is a City for Football Fans” (Indonesia & France). Directed & written by Khozy Rizal. In a city where all men are crazy about football, a man must pretend to love the game so he isn’t  rejected by his new college friends. “Children of the Mist” screens in-person only January 12 – 15, 2023 (PDT). It is a documentary film centered around an indigenous Hmong community and the custom of “bride kidnapping” as directed by Ha Le Diem.  Screening January 25, 26, 29 and February 1 & 2, 2023 is Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan’s “Rogue”. It stars Anita Mui Yim-fong and Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing as doomed lovers in a tragic romance between a humble courtesan and the wayward scion of a wealthy family. And looking ahead, the annual and always popular “Children’s Film Festival of Seattle returns to NWFF February 4 – 12, 2023. 1515 – 12th Ave. on Seattle’s upper Capitol Hill. 206-329-2629 or try  nwfilmforum.org.

SIFF Cinema Uptown has the following. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film “Broker” was done in South Korea and tells the story of two men who sell orphaned infants and how they turn into a family with an infant’s mother in their efforts to find a good home for her child. Two detectives however are hot on their trail. The director sees this as partner to his previous film, “Shoplifters”. Opens January 6, 2023.”Hidden Letters” is a 2022 film by Violet Du Feng starring Xin Hu, Simu Wu and He Yanxin. Women in China were historically forced into oppressive marriages and forbidden to read or write by their households. To cope, they developed and shared a secret language among themselves called Nushu. Spanning past and present, “Hidden Letters” follows two millennia of women who are connected by their fascination with Nushu and their desire to protect its legacy. Opens January 20, 2023. As part of the “Radical Film” series, SIFF screens Bruce Lee in “Enter The Dragon”, widely seen as the actor’s breakout film in Hollywood. Screens on January 30, 2023. “2046” is the final film in Wong Kar-wai’s informal love trilogy. Several women enter a science fiction author’s life a few years after the man has lost his one true love. Stars Takuya Kimura, Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung and Faye Wong. Screens on Thursday, February 2,2023 at 6pm. On March 1. 2023 SIFF screens “Whale Rider”. A young Maori girl seeks to win the approval of her grandfather to ascend to chief in her tribe in what has here-to-for been an all male tradition. 511 Queen Anne Ave. N. 206-464-5830. Go to siff.net for details.

Film Movement Plus (www.filmmovementplus.com) offers consumers immediate access to over 400 festival favorites feature films and shorts as well This is a subscription service available on various formats. New films premiering on this channel include the following – The exclusive North American streaming premiere for Jiang Jichen’s “Looking For Lucky” starting November 25, 2022. When a Chinese grad student loses his professor’s dog in his care, a dog he feels is his ticket to the professor’s favor for a secure teaching post, he panics. Enlisting the aid of his cranky, bleu-collar dad to help him find the dog, stress levels go up as the days go by. A biting satire and an enduring father-son tale, “Looking for Lucky” won the Asian New Talent Award at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Also making a Film Movement premiere is Joe Odagiri’s “Nothing Stays the Same”, the directorial feature film debut by this actor. The story revolves around an aging ferryman in a remote village who sees his entire life transformed when a bridge is built, rendering his services no longer necessary. An official selection of the New  York Asian Film Festival. Screening with this is another Film Movement Plus premiere, “Major Tom”, a Japanese short film by director Takuya Chisaka.   “Center Stage” by Stanley Kwan is available starting September 16, 2022. This story of silent screen siren Ruan Lingyu who committed suicide at age 24 stars international superstar Maggie Cheung. Another exlusive premiere is “Sunshine that can Move Mountains” by Wang Qiang. A Tibetan Monk living in a temple, takes the long way home to visit his brother who is in a vegetative state after falling off a cliff. Despite finding himself enamored by his brother’s fiancée, he refuses his mother’s offer to stay and marry her and instead embarks on a long soul-searching journey.

MUBI presents the following – Atsuko Hirayanagi’s 2017 film “Oh Lucy” follows the cultural collusion of an older Japanese woman caught in a boring job who embarks on a bumpy road to self-discovery. Stars Shinobu Terajima and Josh Harnett.  “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is Chinese director Bi Gan’s 2018 opulent, neo-noir epic that rides a slipstream of memory, dream and reality through the urban wastelands of Guizhou. Bi Gan’s latest project is his 2022 short film entitled A Short Story” which takes a cat’s point of view, drawing from the realm of dreams using a technical virtuosity. Park Chan-Wook’s “Decision To Leave” is  about a detective who investigates a supposed suicide only to become obsessed with the man’s widow. “Money Boys” by C. B. Yi chronicles the lives of Chinese male escorts who are forced to love in the shadows. Taiwanese filmmaker HOU HSIAO-HSIEN has a couple films streaming. His 1987 “Daughter of the Nile” features pop star Yang Lin as the center of a youth culture in 1980s globalized Taipei. His 2015 film “The Assassin” stars Shu Qi as a woman warrior returning from exile and torn between love and duty. The concluding chapter of Michio Yamamoto’s “Bloodthristy Trilogy” entitled “Evil Dracula” from 1974 sees prim school girls become enslaved to the night and lure of vampirism. 

Sarah Chang stars as Sui-ling, the only ally to a short-tempered assassin played by Scott Adkins in “Accident Man: Hitman’s Holiday” directed by George and Harry Kirby. Rent or buy on most major platforms.

Cheon Myeong-gwan directs Jung Woo who plays a gangster in a tug of war in “Hot Blooded – Once upon A Time in Korea” now on Youtube.

Kei played by Kanna Hashimoto is a teenage hired gun in “The Violence Action” adapted from a manga and directed by Toichiro Rota. Now screening in theatres.

Park Hoon-jung’s “The Witch – The Other One” is a sequel to his “The Witch: Part 1-The Subversion”. The plot centers on young women who have escaped from a lab where they were created, raised and endowed with super powers, and the various groups trying to find them. The second part of a trilogy. Rent or buy on most major platforms.

Asian American documentary directors or producers are invited to apply to the 2023 Center for Asian American Media Fellowship Program for a chance to work with mentor filmmakers Jason DeSilva, Deann Borshay Liem and Farihah Zaman. Deadline to apply is January 10, 2023. Try CAAmedia.submittable.com.

The Written & Spoken Arts

Noted New York-based mural artist and children’s author Katie Yamasaki comes to Seattle to pay homage to her Seattle architect grandfather, Minoru Yamasaki who designed Pacific Science Center and the Twin Towers among many other iconic buildings. She has written and illustrated a picture book that celebrates his life entitled “Shapes, Lines, and Light”.  Set for Saturday, January 28, 2023 at 2pm (PST) at Seattle Public Library’s Central Library location on 1000 4th Ave. downtown. This event is presented in partnership with Densho and Elliott Bay Book Company. Go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/katie-yamasaki-discusses-shapes-lines-and-light-tickets-479516345297 for details.

Hugo House, a Seattle-based literary center that offers readings and writing classes offers a full slate of Fall & Winter writing classes for all levels. Some highlights –Hugo House writers-in-residence are available for appointments starting Sept. 19, 2022. This year’s writers are Ching-In Chen and Joyce Chen. Some classes are in person or on a learning platform or via ZOOM. 1634 – 11th Ave. on Capitol Hill. Go to hugohouse.org for complete details.

Elliott Bay Book Company has a full slate of events in their reading series. Here are a few.  Sabrina Imbler, author of “How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures” will engage in conversation with fellow science writer Ed Yong in a virtual event set for January 11, 2023 at 6pm.  In another virtual event, Busha Rehman talks with fellow writer Daisy Hernandez about her novel, “Roses in the Mouth of a Lion” on Thursday, January 12 at 6pm. It’s a fiercely compassionate coming-of-age story of a Pakistani American girl from Queens struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desire to be true to herself. January 27 at 7pm will bring an in-person reading by Seattle Arts & Lectures Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Group. Young poets Aamina Mughal, Abby Skeel, Kyle Gerstel, Keegan York and Baya Cohen-Knott will read. Local writer Angela Garbes engages in conversation with novelist Miriam Toews about her new book “Fight Night” about a strong spirited grandmother and her relationship with her granddaughter on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 7pm at the store. Arthur Hansen, noted historian on Japanese American internment history will discuss Yoshito Kuromiya’s “Beyond the Betrayal: The memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience”, a book he edited  with fellow local writer, editor, filmmaker and Japanese American historian Frank Abe on Wed., February 1, 2023 at 7pm. Jenny Liou, is a local poet, former cage fighter and writer who will discuss in-person with fellow writer Tessa Hulls her memoir entitled “Muscle Memory” which deals with violence, identity and the sweep of Chinese American history. Set for Monday, February 6, 2023 at 7pm. Seattle University professor Sonora Jha will discuss her new novel “The Laughter” in-person with fellow local writer Kim Fu on Wed., February 15, 2023 at 7pm. The book tells the story of a white male English professor who becomes obsessed with a female Pakistani colleague in a perceptive exploration of race, gender and power.  For making reservations to the virtual events, go to elliottbaybook.com and click on the “Events Page” or call toll-free at 1-800-962-5311. Some events are virtual and accessed through eventbrite.com. 1521 – 10th Ave. Local # is 206-624-6600.

Seattle Arts & Lectures has unveiled their new fall season. On Tuesday, January 17. 2023, poet Jenny Xie appears in-person and online. Xie is the author of “Eye Level” which was a National Book Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist in poetry. Her newest book of poetry looks at the Cultural Revolution in China and the personal involvement of some of her family members in that historical movement. It has been short-listed for a National Book Award in the “Poetry” category. Visionary novelist Ruth Ozeki returns to Seattle to speak in-person and online on Saturday, March 18, 2023. Noted travel writer Pico Iyer appears in person and online on Tuesday, May 2, 2023. For details on these events, try sal.lectures.org or call 206-621-2230.

Eastwind Books in Berkeley has one of the extensive collections of books by Asian American authors and new books on Asia in the country. They also have a full calendar of readings and events. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, author of “The Trauma of Caste – A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing and Abolition” will talk about her book on Sunday, January 8, 2023 at 3pm (PT) in a free in-store event. Go to traumaofcaste.eventbrite.com for details. ”Wanna Peek Into Our Notebooks?” is the title of an in-person group poetry reading with Bay Area women writers Avotcja, Barbara Jane Reyes, Tureeda Mikell and Janice Lobo Sapiago. Set for Saturday, January 14 at 3pm (PT).  2066 University Ave.in Berkeley,CA. 510-548-2350 or try asiabookcenter.com or email [email protected] 

The University of Washington Press is seeking writers working on a manuscript or new book proposal. UW Press editors are eager to connect with current and prospective authors about new projects and book proposals. Contact them via email of set up a meeting by phone or Zoom. Executive Editor is Lorri Hagman at [email protected].

Below is a partial list of new books by or about Asian Americans and new titles on Asia. If you are interested in reviewing any of them, please let us know –

“Free Kid to Good Home” (Gecko Press) written and illustrated by Hiroshi Ito is an enduring Japanese bestseller now in its 31st edition which finally gets an American edition as translated by Cathy Hirano. When the only daughter of a Japanese family finds attention shifting away from her with the arrival of a baby brother, she revolts and runs away from home. She plants herself in a box on the sidewalk with a sign, “Free Kid to a Good Home”.

“Dancing With The Dead – The Essential Red Pine Translations” (Copper Canyon) by Red Pine. Considered one of the finest translators of Chinese poetic and religious texts, this new collection gathers over thirty voices from the ancient Chinese past such as Hanshan, Stonehouse, Wei Yingwu, Liu Zongyuan and Tao Tuanming as deftly translated by this Port Townsend resident, Bill Porter known by his pen name of Red Pine.

“Say Hello?” (Berbay Publishing) as written and illustrated by Sung Mi Kim  and translated by Clare Richards. In cartoonish line drawings accented in blue and red, the author tells a light-hearted, comedic tale of two strangers and their increasingly awkward encounters and how saying hello right from the beginning could have made all the difference.

“one long listening – a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care” (North Atlantic Books) by Chenxing Han, author of “Be the Refuge”. Immigrant daughter, novice chaplain, bereaved friend: Han takes us on a pilgrimage through the wilds of grief and laughter, pain and impermanence, reconnecting us to both the heartache and inexplicable brightness of being human.

“The Symmetry of Fish” (Penguin Books) by Su Cho is a National Poetry Series winner as selected by Paige Lewis. This debut poetry collection about immigration, memory and a family’s lexicon shines light on the Korean and Korean American imagination.

“The Love Match” (Simon & Schuster) by Priyanka Taslim is a heartfelt rom-com about a Bangladeshi American teenage girl whose meddling mother arranges a match to secure their family’s financial security—just as she’s falling in love with someone else.

“Fuochi D’artificio – Jinta Hirayama – Catalogo Illustrato” (Lazy Dog) is a small, charming book of this noted Japanese illustrator and his depections of Japanese fireworks designs by this small press from Italy.

“Owlish” (Graywolf Press) by Dorothy Tse as translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce. A literature professor locked in a dull marriage and a lackluster career falls in love with a mechanical ballerina found in his collection. This eerie debut novel is a bold exploration of life under an oppressive regime and an uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.

“My Nest of Silence”(Antheneum) written and illustrated by Matt Faulkner is a young adult novel about a Japanese American teenage boy who writes about his experience living in Manzanar internment camp during WWII.

“Once And Forever – The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa” (New York Review of Books) translated from the Japanese by John Bester. Miyazawa was a poet, farmer and beloved spinner of tales whose sly, humorous, enchanting, and enigmatic stories bear a certain resemblance to those of his contemporary Robert Walser. Miyazawa had a deep connection to Japanese folklore and an intense love of the natural world with all its beauty, cruelty and contradictions. 

“Looking Up: The Skyviewing Sculptures of Isamu Noguchi”(Giles) just concluded its run at Western Art Gallery in Bellingham. This exhibition catalog is the first major publication to take an in-depth look at the artist’s interest in outer space and charting our place in the universe. This book explores the artist’s long career as a sculptor who works with environments, from his early days in the studio of Constantin Brancusi into a context of younger generation of artists like Richard Serra and Nancy Holt. By Hafthor Yngvason, Matthew Kirsch and Kate Wiener.

“Burning Like Her Own Planet”  (Alice James) by Vandana Khanna. Against a backdrop of iconic, ancient Hindu texts, this book reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses through a contemporary feminist lens. Told in a series of persona poems and dramatic monologues, the book reinvents these myths into essential stories of love, betrayal, and faith. Set for April 2023 release. 

“Night Lunch” (Tundra) by Eric Fan and illustrated by Dena Seiferling. When night descends, furry noses sniff the air as mouthwatering smells from a lavish lunch cart lure growling bellies toward a tasty bite.  This magical ode to Victorian lunch carts is a nocturnal tale suitable for adults and the child in us. With compelling,mood-evoking artwork.

“Seeing Ghosts” (Grand Central Publishing) by Kat Chow. With a voice that is both wry and heartfelt, the author weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family’s history of loss, spanning three generations as they emigrate from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America.

“Zen for Kids” (Bala Kids) by Laura Burges and illustrated by Melissa Iwai.This is a book of zen-inspired activities and stories to help kids learn about patience, kindness, honesty, sharing and forgiveness. Each chapter has a new story to explore, with themed discussion questions, meditations, journal prompts, and hands-on projects.

”Feast” (Alice James Books) by Ina Carino explores the intricacies of intergenerational nourishment beyond trauma, as well as the bonds and community formed when those in diaspora feed each other, both literally and metaphorically. At times located in the Philippines, at others in the US, the speaker of these poems is curious about how home can be an alchemy from one to the other. Carina is a winner of the 2022 Whiting Award in Poetry and the 2021 Alice James Award. Set for publication on March 7, 2023.

“A Life Of Service – The Story of Senator Tammy Duckworth” (Candlewick Press) by Christina Soontornvat and illustrated by Dow Phumiruk. In a tribute to an extraordinary woman, this picture book tells the inspirational and barrier-breaking life of Senator Tammy Duckworth. A good  example of the story of female role model that young Asian American girls can look up to.

“All in a Day” (Berbay Publishing) written and illustrated by Chihiro Takeuchi. A fun book that teaches toddlers how to read time. Follow the comings and goings of everyone who lives and works in the same building and enjoy the interactive search-and-find as we see what happens throughout the day.

“Daodejing” (Liveright) by Laozi as translated by Brook Ziporyn. This is transformative new edition of Taoism’s central text that overturns its reputation for calming, gnomic wisdom, revealing instead in this new translation, a work of “philosophical dynamite”.

“Lady Joker – Volume One” (Soho Crime) by Kaoru Takamura. Translated from the Japanese by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell. In 1995, five men meet at the racetrack every Sunday. They have little in common except a deep disaffection with their lives, but together they represent the social struggles and dissapointments of postwar Japan. Intent on revenge against a society that values corporate behemoths more than human life, the five conspirators decide to kidnap a CEO of one of Japan’s biggest companies and extract blood money from the company’s financiers.

“New Women of Empire – Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America” (UW Press) by Chrissy Yee Lau. A rare reveal of Japanese American young women of the Roaring Twenties who made indelible changes in public and private circles including expanding sexual freedoms, redefining women’s roles in society and furthering racial justice work.

“Until Nirvana’s Time-Buddhist Songs from Cambodia” (Shambhala) is the first collection of traditional Cambodian Buddhist literature available in English, presenting original translations of forty-five poems.

“Decade Of The Brain – Poems” (Alice James Books) by Janine Joseph. Set for January 17, 2023  release. In a deeply personal book, Joseph writes of a newly-naturalized citizen who suffers from post-concussive memory loss after a major accident and the odyssey of what it means to recover both mentally and physically.

“Kanishka Raja- I And I”(Hirmer/the Davis)  by Lisa Fischer. A book that formed the basis for an exhibition catalog. A look at the ravishing work of this  experimental  painter that in his own words, “explores the intersection of representation, craft, technology and the gaps that occur in the transmission of information.”

“If You Could See The Sun”  (Inkyard Press) by Ann Liang. Alice Sun has always felt invisible at her elite Beijing international boarding school, where she’s the only scholarship student in a sea of wealthy classmates. Her plan is to get into a prestigious university, graduate with honors, secure a killer job and lift her family out of poverty. But plans turn to dust when her parents tell her they can no longer afford her tuition. Then she starts turning uncontrollably invisible.

“The Bear and the Little Green Thing” (Berbay Publishing) by written and illustrated by Diandian. This beautifully illustrated book with sparse text reveals the intimate connection and friendship  that develops between a large bear and a sapling and their journey through nature.

“Daughters Of The New Year” (Hanover Square) by E. M. Tran. This novel is a spellbinding tale about the extraordinary women within a Vietnamese immigrant family and the ancient zodiac legend that binds them together.

“The Picture Bride” (Forge), a novel by Lee Geum-yi as translated by An Seonjae. It is 1918 and the matchmaker tells Willow her future husband is a landowner, food and clothing is plentiful and you will be able to go to school. But life in Hawai’i is hard and the future uncertain. Still she works tirelessly toward a better life for her family.

“The Porcelain Moon” (William Morrow) by Janie Chang. From the author of “The Library of Legends” comes a vividly rendered novel set in WWI France about two young women – one Chinese and one French –whose lives intersect with unexpected, potentially dangerous consequences. A tale of forbidden love, identity and belonging and what  people are willing to risk for freedom.

“koho mori-newton/no intention” (Hirmer) by Herausgegeben Von Karl Borromaus Murr. Since the 1980s, this artist has forged his own unique path, along which he has questioned the very foundation of art itself. With a skeptical view of the construct of content, the artist uses various elements of paper, silk, frame or india ink as his materials to forge a new center for his artistic search.

“Novelist as a Vocation” (Knopf) by Haruki Murakami. In this book, the writer shares with readers his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most popular fiction writers as well known in that country as Stephen King of James Patterson is here in the U.S. His “The Devotion of Suspect X” was shortlisted for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. His latest offering “A Death in Tokyo” (Minotaur) as translated by Giles Murray has Tokyo Police detective Kaga trying to make sense of a most unusual murder.

“Jun Kaneko – The Space Between) (Scheidegger & Spiess) by Glen R. Brown. Jun Kaneko, revered for his role in establishing modern ceramic art, has been equally prolific in a range of other media. Tracing the career of this dynamic Japanese American artist from his early training and association with the pivotal California Clay Movement to his important public commissions and philanthropic concerns of the present, this book constitutes a detailed survey and analysis of nearly six decades of his work in ceramics, drawing, painting, installation art and opera design. 

“The Many Hats of Louie The Rat” (Owl Kids) written and illustrated by Sakshi Mangal. Louie the rat makes useful things out of recycled materials but no one pays any notice to his ingenuity until a flood comes. Lessons on practicality for kids.

“The Genesis of Misery” (Tor) by Neon Yang. An immersive, electrifying space fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.

“Where The Lost Ones Go” (FSG) by Akemi Dawn Bowman. Eliot Katayama is grieving for her paternal grandmother who just passed away. She desperately searches for any sign that ghosts are real and in that way, perhaps can hold on to her grandmother’s memory. When she discovers ghosts in Honeyfield Hall, she wants to help them remember their pasts and unlock the memory of her own grandmother.

“Fight Back” (Tu Books) by A.M. Dassu. A terrorist attack at a concert changes everything for Aaliyah, a Muslim teenager. Local racists are emboldened and anti-Muslim rhetoric starts cropping up in school and on the street. When her school bans the hijab she is wearing and she is attacked and intimated, she must fight back. But can she fight back and can she find allies?

“She Is A Haunting” (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)  by Trang Thanh Tran is due out February 28, 2023. A deeply evocative ghost story about a Vietnamese American girl named Jade who would give anything to feel like she belongs somewhere —and the deadly haunted house that is desperate to consume her family, the girl she loves and Jade herself.

“We Uyghurs Have No Say – An Imprisoned Writer Speaks” (Verso) by Ilham Tohti. This is a first collection of writings and interviews by one of the world’s foremost experts on Uyghurs and Chinese policy in Xinjiang. Now in prison, Tohti calls upon all people of conscience to stand in opposition to Islamophobia and the repressive policies enforced by current Chinese government authorities.

“Surface Relations – Queer Forms Of Asian American Inscrutability” (Duke) by Vivian L. Huang. In this book, the author trace how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance. Following inscrutability in literature, visual culture, and performance art since 1965, Huang articulates how Asian American artists take up the aesthetics of Asian inscrutability —such as invisibility, silence, unreliability, flatness and withholding—to express Asian American life. 

“She Sang For India – How M. S. Subbulaksmi Used Her Voice for Change” (FSG) by Suma Subramaniam and illustrated by Shreya Gupta. This picture book tells the story of a famous Carnatic singer and the first Indian woman to perform at the United Nations. In early 1900s India, women were not allowed to perform for the public yet she found a way. Her fascinating odyssey tells the story of a woman who changed the world.

“Weasels In The Attic” (New Directions) by Hiroko Oyamada as translated by David Boyd. Due out October 2022. From the acclaimed author of “The Hole” and “The Factory” comes a thrilling and mysterious novel that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan In three interconnected scenes, the writer revisits the same set of characters at different junctures in their lives. 

“Complicit” (Emily Bestler Books/Atria) by Winnie M. Li. A Hollywood has-been, Sarah Lai has left her dreams of filmmaking success by the wayside. But when a journalist reaches out to her to discuss her experience working with a celebrated film producer, Sarah can no longer keep silent As she recounts the industry’s dark and sordid secrets, however, she begins to realize she has a few sins of her own to confess.

Marya Khan And The Incredible Henna Party (Amulet) by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Ani Bushry. With Marya’s eighth birthday coming up, all she wants is a party as awesome as her rich neighbor. But how can she make it happen? Everything she does seems to end in disaster. Will she find a way to throw the best party ever?

“Almanac Of Useless Talents” (Clash) is a new book of poetry by Michael Chang. “Michael Chang’s poetry collections are praised for their biting wit and humor, for their critique of injustice, for their juxtaposition of highbrow and low, for their velocity, their leaps, their sense of scale, for their sweeping range of style and subject and tone. The praise is well-earned and accurately describes Chang’s newest book. Chang reminds us that the bawdy, the blunt, the quip are as much a part of poetry as the romantic, the eloquent, the aphoristic. His poems inspire us to critique what we love, not in spite of that love, but because of it.” – Blas Falconer

“The Blue Scarf” (RPKids) by Mohamed Danawi and illustrated by Ruaida Mannaa. Layla is gifted a blue scarf by her mother that she lovingly wears around her neck. But when the wind carries it away, Layla sails the seas to various world of different colors in an effort to find it. But no one has seen her scarf – where can it be?

“Why We Can’t Have Nice Things – Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property” (Duke) by Minh-Ha T. Pham. In this book, Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knockoff fashion, design theft, and plagiarism.

“A Bilingual Treasury of Chinese Folktales-Ten Traditional Stories in Chinese and English” (Tuttle) by Vivian Lin and Wang Peng and illustrated by Yang Xi. All cultures have stories telling you what life is all about. This collection tells you how to be a good person and have a good life. The lessons in this book are presented in a charming way, so children can discover them for themselves.

From the award-winning author of “Amina’s Voice” comes “Zara’s Rules for Finding Hidden Treasure” (Salaam Reads) by Hena Khan and illustrated by Wastana Haikal. When a new family moves in across the street, suddenly Zara who is queen of her neighborhood finds her reign threatened. To get everyone’s attention again, Zara decides she’s going to break a Guinness World Record. But when no one notices, Zara learns a lesson.

“1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows – A Memoir” (Crown) by Ai Weiwei. This dissident Chinese artist tells the remarkable history of China while also illuminating his artistic process and divulging the tragic story of his celebrated poet father and how the family suffered during the Cultural Revolution.

“Buddha And The Rose” (RP KIDS) by Mallika Chopra and illustrated by Neha Rawat. Buddha sat with a rose in his hand, still. Sujata the milkmaid beings him pudding to break his fast, she too gazes at the rose. What she saw and felt changes her life forever.

“In The Beautiful Country” (Quill Tree) by Jane Kuo. A young adult novel in  verse about a Taiwanese family who move to America with hopes and dreams. But reality dashes hopes and brings doubt the family will last even one year. A moving novel about finding your way in the world and what it truly means for a place to become home.

“Holding On” (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) by Sophia N. Lee and illustrated by Isabel Roxas. There is always singing in Lola’s house. Her granddaughter tucks these sounds and Lola’s wisdom deep within her heart. And when Lola starts slipping into silence, she helps Lola hold on, piece by piece, with the joy and music that Lola taught her. The artwork is vibrant and colorful and moves the story along.

What’s The Rush? (Princeton Architectural Press) written and illustrated by Yiting Lee. In this reimagined picture book version of Aesop’s fable, children will learn the importance of friendship, tolerance and patience as they follow the adventures of Bunny and Turtle.

“The Love Match”(Salaam Reads) by Priyanka Taslim. This young adult novel is a rom-com about a Bangladeshi American teenager whose meddling mother arranges a match to secure their family’s financial security—just as she’s falling in love with someone else.

“One Wish – Fatima al-Fihri and the World’s Oldest University” (Harper) by M.O. Yuksel and illustrated by Miriam Quaraishi. This picture book tells the story of a woman, her dream and the importance of never giving up and how we all have the power to change the world for the better.

“Kaleidoscope” (Dutton) by Cecily Wong. A biracial Chinese American  family build a shopping empire sourcing luxury goods from around the world. But when calamity strikes, two sisters must wrestle with questions that challenge memory, identity, loyalty and the tenuous ties that hold them together.

“Love From Mecca To Medina (Simon & Schuster) by S. K. Ali. The young couple Adam and Zayneb return in this romantic sequel to the young adult novel, “Love From A to Z”. Enduring a long-distance relationship, the couple is thrilled when fate brings them together on a religious pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. But the trip is nothing like what they expect as emotions and anxieties come to the surface.

“Buddhist Stories for Kids – Jataka Tales of Kindness, Friendship, and Forgiveness” (bala kids) by Laura Burges and illustrated by Sonali Zohra. Travel back in time to ancient India and hear these profound and playful tales, brought vividly to life ad reinterpreted for children today.

“Names and Rivers” (Copper Canyon) by Shuri Kido as translated by Tomoyuki Endo  and Forrest Gander. Considered one of the most influential poets in Japan today, these poems draw influence from Japanese culture, geography, Buddhist teachings and modernist poets. This is a book made of crossings, questionings and mysteries as unanswered and open as the sky.

“Astrid & Apollo” is a new series of books about a Hmong American sister and brother as they engage in a variety of activities and along the way the stories educate readers about Hmong American culture. They are written by V.T. Bidania and illustrated by Evelt Yanait and published by Picture Window Books, a Capstone imprint. The titles published thus far inclue the following – “Astrid & Apollo And The Family Fun Fair Day”, ”Astrid & Apollo And The Awesome Dance Audition”, “Astrid & Apollo And The Super Staycation” and “Astrid & Apollo And The Ice Fishing Adventure.” 

“Storybook ND” is a new series of slim hardcover fiction books from New Directions that aim to deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in just one afternoon. New in this series are a couple of stories by Japanese authors. “3 Streets” by Yoko Tawada as translated by Margaret Mitsutani introduces three ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin. “Early Light” by Osamu Dazai offers three very different aspects of this fiction writer’s genius as translated by Donald Keene and Ralph McCarthy. The misadventures of a drinker and a family man in the terrible  fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII.  Another tale looks at the symbol of Mt. Fuji as a cliché as the author finds it unable to escape its famous views and reputation. The final story follows the ascension of a drunkard’s wife as she transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything life throws at her.

“It’s Diwali!” (Beach Lane) by Kabir Sehgal and Surishtha Sehgal and illustrated by Archana Sreenivasan. Kids can read along to the tune of the nursery rhyme “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” and discover what makes this Indian festival so special.

“A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts” (NYRB) by Wang Yin as translated by Andrea Lingenfelter with a foreword by Adonis.  Wang Yin is recognized as a leading member of the post-Misty poets, a group inspired by the underground movement that resisted the artistic mores of 1970s China. This collection maps his 40-year career in its brushes with Romanticism, Surrealism, satire and Deep Image poetry.

“Journey of the Midnight Sun” (Orca) by Shazia Afzal and illustrated by Aliya Ghare. Inuvik, a small but growing Muslim community in the Canadian arctic was in need of  new mosque. Funds were raised to build and ship the mosque but the harrowing journey wasn’t easy. Along the way, so many people helped.

“Innocence” (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) by Korean American poet Michael Joseph Walsh. Winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series  Competition. The series judge Shane McCrae said this of the book – “Complete as first books of poetry rarely are, integral as first books of poetry rarely are, “Innocence” reads as if it exists only to be; it pursues no end other than its own being which is the end of all successful works of art, whatever a particular work’s subject. “Innocence” is “that spoken thing/Only now created/That opens out into every room” which is to say, alive from beginning to end, a life.

“Dad, don’t Miss It! (MinEditions-Astra Books for Young Readers) written and illustrated by Qiaoqiao Li. A child and his father are off for a day in the countryside—but dad is distracted  by his computer. Why can’t dad see what the child sees? An enchanting story  about the power of unplugging from our devices.

“My Nemesis” (Grove) by Charmaine Craig, author of “Miss Burma”. Tessa is a successful white woman writer who develops a friendship with Charlie, a handsome philosopher and scholar. But obstacles to this burgeoning relationship appear in the guise of Charlie’s mixed-race Asian wife Wah, as she proves to be both adversary and conundrum to Tessa.

“Berani” (Pajama Press) by Michelle Kadarusman. Malia is determined to save the rainforests and endangered orangutans of her Indonesian homeland. Ari is grateful for the chance to live with his uncle and go to school but his uncle’s caged orangutan’s living condition is breaking his heart. When Malia and Ari cross paths, their futures— and the orangutan’s—will forever be changed in this middle grade novel.

My Grand Mom (Amazon Crossing Kids), written and illustrated by Gee-eum Lee and translated by Sophie Bowman. A little Korean girl whose parents work a lot spends her days with her grandmother. Based on the author’s own relationship with her grandma, this book is a celebration of a most unique and precious guardian. The illustrations are a whimsical delight.

“Brown Is Beautiful” (Farrar Straus & Giroux) by Supriya Kelkar and illustrated by Noor Sofi. On a day hike with her grandparents, a young Indian American girl takes pictures of things in nature that are brown like her. An uplifting story  of self-love and new beginnings.

“Abundance” (Graywolf) is a novel by Jakob Guanzon. A father and son on the edge of poverty lose their safety net and fall into the abyss of hopelessness that plagues the American landscape. What makes people poor and what kind of system keeps them mired in that condition.

byYQ is a small press created by children’s author Yobe Qiu to publish her picture books for children. Here are three of their titles. “Our Moon Festival” illustrated by Christina Nel Lopez looks at the way this holiday is celebrated in China, Vietnam and Japan including the use of puppets, poetry, lion dances and lanterns. ”Asian Adventures A – Z” as illustrated by Jade Le journeys around Asia highlighting traditions and cultures of Asia’s countries while also teaching little ones, the alphabet. “I Am An Amazing Asian Girl – A Positive Affirmation Book For Asian Girls” as illustrated by Jade Le follows an assertive Asian girl on a journey of positive affirmations as she embraces her culture and identity.

Step away from your daily life and enter the stillness of “Mindfulness Travel Japan” (Hardie Grant) by Steve Wide and Michelle Mackintosh. This book brings you 100 of the best travel experiences all over Japan.

“Glorious Boy” (Red Hen) by Aimee Liu. “Set in a penal colony on the remote Andaman Islands, this novel is the whirlwind story of vanishing cultures, Unbreakable codes, rebellion, occupation, and colonization, all swirling around the disappearance of a mute four-year-old boy on the eve of the Japanese occupation of Port Blair.” – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.

“Model Machines – A History Of The Asian As Automaton” (Temple University Press) by Long T. Bui. “In this powerful and indispensable historiography, Long Bui puts to rest any lingering doubt about the pernicious pervasiveness of the model machine myth that has long cast Asians as technologized non-humans in American cultural and economic histories.” – Betty Huang

“Happy Stories, Mostly”  (Feminist Press) by Norman Erikson Pasaribu  as translated by Tiffany Tsao. Queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, this volume presents short stories that ask what it means to be almost happy—nearly to find joy, to sort of be accepted,  but to never fully grasp one’s desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach.

“Dragon Noodles Party – A Story of Chinese Zodiac Animals” (Holiday House) by Ying Chang Compestine and illustrated by Paula Pang. This children’s picture book involves all the animals of the Chinese zodiac as they go on a journey one by one to prepare food for a party for one of their favorite friends.

“About Us – Young Photography in China” (Hirmer) by Eva-Maria Fahrner-Tutsek and Petra Giloy-Hirtz. What does photography tell us about the life experience of an individual facing a rapidly changing society? What pictorial language is a younger generation of artists in China creating in its search for self-understanding? This book of over 200 photographs from the 1990s to the present by forty artists gives us an inside glimpse and shows how it is experienced and lived by its young people.

“Direwood” (Page Street) by Catherine Yu. When older sister Fiona goes missing, sixteen-year-old Aja discovers a vampire is responsible. But to find her sister, she must follow this vampire into the woods. Shocking body horror and dangerous romance with a vampire co-mingle in this debut novel. A gothic tangle of a tale.

“The Age of Goodbyes” (Feminist Press) by Li Zi Shu as translated by YZ Chin. In 1969, in the wake of Malaysia’s deadliest race riots, a woman named Du Li An secures her place in society by marrying a gangster. In a parallel narrative, a critic known only as The Fourth Person explores the work of a writer also named Du Li An. And a third storyline is in the second person: “you” are reading a novel titled “The Age of Goodbyes”. Floundering in the wake of your mother’s death, you are trying to unpack the secrets surrounding your lineage. This novel is a profound exploration of what happens to personal memory when official accounts of history distort and render it taboo.

“The Curious Thing” (W. W. Norton) by Sandra Lim. “These are poems of passion and self-scrutiny and female rage, but Sandra Lim is not a poet of explosive feeling. The poems have a  prose elegance; they are cool, detached, ruminative, with a kind of whistle-in-the-dark bravado. Here is a mind studying itself and its ambivalence, exact at every turn, and by the end, breathtaking.” –Nobel-Prize winning poet Louise Gluck.

“Seen And Unseen – What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adam’s Photographs Reveal About The Japanese American Incarceration” (Chronicle) by Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki. This young adult history book weaves together photo documentation, first hand accounts, and stunning original art to reveal the history, heartbreak, and injustice of the Japanese incarceration.

PAON – Real Balinese Cooking”  (Hardie Grant) by Tjok Maya Kerth Yasa and  I Wayan Kresna Yasa. Direct from the traditional home kitchens of Bali, “PAON” is a cookbook of true Balinese food and recipes. Locals share more than 80 traditional dishes alongside essays and beautiful photography, capturing the life, culture and food from across the island.

“The Book of Goose” (Farrar Straus & Giroux) is a novel by Yiyun Li. As children in a war-ravaged, back water town, Fabienne and Agnes built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—–until Fabienne, the ruler of their little world, hatched a plan that would change everything, launching Agnes on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss. When her sister dies, Fabienne embarks on an entirely different relationship with her life and fame.

“Unspoken” (Hirmer) by Miwa Ogasawara. The human between light and shade, closeness and distance. Ogasawara’s painting represents in all of their nuances. In her pictures she captures the brittle, shimmering present, the beauty and fragility of our existence.

Avatasha Rao’s “Latitude” (The American Poetry Review) was the 2021 winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize as selected by Ada Limon. It’s a book of poems that honor both the human animal and the timelessness of our earth in poem after poem.

“When I Was The Wind”  (June Road Press) by Port Townsend-based poet Hannah Lee Jones. In her debut poetry collection, Jones brings readers on a mythic journey across a vast physical and metaphysical landscape. What emerges is a richly textured map of love and loss, a tapestry of hard-won truths both personal and universal. At turns mysterious, dreamlike, intimate, and illuminating, these poems explore what is wild and timeless in the human soul.

“Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club” (Berkley) by Roselle Lim. When a disgraced matchmaker returns from Shanghai to her hometown of Toronto, the prospects seem bleak. That is until she meets a group of older Chinese men who never found love. They adopt her and shower her with support. This is a story rich with a love of food, family support and cultural identity. 

“Ai Weiwei – In Search Of Humanity”  (Hirmer) Edited by dieter Buchhart, Elsy  Lahner and Klaus Albrecht Schroder. This book serves as the catalog for the most comprehensive retrospective for this Chinese artist to date by the Albetina Museum. The exhibition offers an impressive overview of the artist’s career spanning more than four decades and includes key works from all his creative phases. With short essays by various writers.

“A Bit of Earth” (Greenwillow)by Karuna Riazi. A reimagining of the classic “The Secret Garden” tells the story of a Pakistani girl bounced between relatives after her parent’s death and then shipped off to America where she feels lost until she discovers the garden, a place off limits yet where her self identity can bloom.

“Prescribee” (Nightboat) by Chia-Lun Chang. Reading this book is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, “Prescribee” is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.

“This Place is Still Beautiful” (Balzer + Bray) by Xixi Tian is a story of two estranged sisters who could not be more unlike, forced together after a racially-motivated  hate crime marks their family in small town Ohio. It explores racism, identity, the model minority myth, sisterhood and how hometowns are inextricably part of who we are even as we leave them.

“My Magical Castle” (Abrams Appleseed) written and illustrated by Yujin Shin. This board book for toodlers flies kids off to a magical castle with a dragon and his friends. They can push, pull and slide the images inside to bring their adventures to life.

“O.B.B.” (Nightboat Books) by Paolo Javier. Crafted through years-long collaborations O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy is a postcolonial techno dream pop comics poem. It is a book that can’t be pinned down with many identities; it is a comics poem and a manifesto on comics poetry; an experimental comic book sequel to a poem twenty years in the making; and an homage to the Mimeo Revolution, weird fiction, Kamishibai, the political cartoon, Pilipinx komiks history, and the poet bp/Nichol. Javier deconstructs a post-9/11 Pilipinx identity, amid the lasting fog of the Philippine American War, to compose a far-out comic book.

“Accomplice to Memory” (Kaya) by Q. M. Zhang. In this unusual book, the author tries to piece together the fractured mystery of her father’s exodus from China to the U.S. during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. Part memoir, part novel, and part historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Zhang blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, memory and imagination to tell the story of one woman working to understand and reimagine her family and her father.

“Little Red Riding Hood and the Dragon” (Abrams) by Ying Chang Compestine and illustrated by Joy Ang. The author re-invents the old folktale of a girl in a red cape gobbled up by a wolf and presumes to tell the “real” story.  That of a little girl who lives with her mother near the Great Wall of China and practices kung fu. When she ventures into the woods to visit a sick grandmother she encouners a mighty dragon. With her wits and sword in hand, she defeats the monster. With action, humor and vibrant drawings, a classic fairy tale gets a new life.

“Poukahangatus” (Knopf) by Taye Tebble. Hilarious, intimate, moving and virtuosic, this young woman is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. She challenges a dazzling array of mythologies – Greek, Maori, feminist, Kiwi – peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and she as a Maori woman fits into trends, stereotypes, and popular culture.

“You’ve Changed – Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar” (Catapult) by Pyae Moe Thet War. A Myanmar millennial speaks back in this electric debut essay collection playfully challenging us to examine the knots and complications of immigration status, eating habits, Western feminism in an Asian home, and more, guiding us toward an expansive idea of what it means to be a Myanmar woman today.

“A Venom Dark And Sweet” (Feiwel & Friends)  by Judy I. Lin. A great evil has come to the Kingdom of Daxi. The banished prince has returned. Mass poisonings have kept the people bound in fear and distrust. Ning, a young magician has escorted the princess into exile with her bodyguards. These four young women must go in search of allies to help oust the invaders and take back the throne. But an evil more ancient than the petty conflicts of men haunts. What can be done before it consumes the world?

“Virgil Kills: Stories” (Nightboat Books) by Ronaldo V. Wilson. Linked stories, alighting from a US, Black and Filipino imaginary through a central character, Virgil, and his accounts of race, sex, and desire. This book forms, manifesting a set of poetic investigations—revealing black and brown life, memory, dreams, the sea, the sex-act, the line. Virgil travels in theaters and lots, moves against class, whiteness, on stages, at lecterns, in studios and a luxury vehicle. Virgil records in the sensorium of cruising lovers, real love, family, T.V., and characters with names like “Butch,” “Stream,” “Clean”—his precise unfurling.

“Koreatown, Los Angeles – Immigration, Race, and the ‘American Dream’” (Stanford University Press) by Shelly Sang-Hee Lee. This book tells the story of an American ethnic community often equated with socioeconomic achievement and assimilation, but whose experiences as racial minorities and immigrant outsiders illuminate key economic and cultural developments in the United States since 1965.

“Sunday Pancakes” (Dial) written and illustrated by Maya Tatsukawa. Geisel Award honoree Tatsukawa has created a heartwarming and nourishing story that celebrates friendship and the ultimate comfort food. And aspiring young chefs can also test out the pancake recipe found in the story at the end.

“Becoming Nisei – Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma” (UW Press) by Lisa M. Hoffman & Mary L. Hanneman. Based on more than forty interviews, these informants share stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after WW II.

“Theo Tan And The Fox Spirit” (Feiwel & Friends) by Jesse Q. Sutanto. From the author of the adult bestseller, “Dial A For Aunties” comes her first middle grade fantasy.  Theo Tan doesn’t want a spirit companion – he just wants to be a normal American kid. But when his older brother dies, he ends up inheriting his fox spirit, Kai. Though both are not happy with this arrangement, they must set aside differences to honor the brother’s last wishes or the mystery he died for will remain unsolved forever.

“Saving Sorya-Chang And The Sun Bear” (Dial Graphic) by Trang Nguyen & Jeff Zdung. A poignant middle grade graphic novel adventure based on a true story, about a young conservationist who overcomes the odds to save a sun bear.

“The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern” (Melville House) by Rita Zoey Chin. Raised as “the youngest and very best fortune teller in the world” by her mother, Leah Fern is devastated when that very same mother disappears from her life. Fifteen years later and no sight of her mom, Leah decides to end her life only to be interrupted by a knock on the door and a message that takes her on a journey that will be a revelation.

“The Dawn of Yangchen – Chronicles of the Avatar” (Amulet) by F. G. Yee. Yangchen has not yet earned the respect felt for her predecessor, and the loss of her sister has left her with few true allies. But in Bin-Er – a city run by corrupt shang merchants seeking to extract themselves from the Earth King’s influence – a chance encounter with an informant named Kavik leads to a wary partnership.  This propulsive third installment in the Chronicles of the Avatar series illuminates our heroine’s journey from uncertain, young woman to revered leader.

“Yuna’s Cardboard Castles” (Beaming Books) by Marie Tang and illustrated by Jieting Chen. Yuna and her family have moved from Japan to the US and she doesn’t speak English yet. At first, her attempts to catch the attention of the neighborhood kids get lost in translation, but when she shows that she can do something very special with paper, a whole new world unfolds. In the back of the book, there is information about the origin of origami and how kids can fold their own paper boat.

“The Backstreets – A Novel From Xinjiang” (Columbia University Press) by Perhat Tursun as translated by Darren Byler and anonymous. “The publication of this book, together with Byler’s illuminating introduction, is a landmark event in English-language world literature. The narration of the life of a Uyghur office worker in Urumchi is unforgettable and mind-blowing. The style, mood and scope are evocative of Camus while still feeling utterly distinctive and unprecedented. A triumph.”- Elif Batuman. This novel is by a contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese State.

“Three Assassins” (Overlook) by Kotaro Isaka is the follow up to the international bestselling author of “Bullet Train” (now a Hollywood movie). Translated from the Japanese by Sam Malissa, the story pits an ordinary man against a network of quirky and effective assassins. To get justice for his wife’s murder, this man must take on each of the three assassins while struggling to maintain his moral center.

“Penguin and Penelope”(Bloomsbury)  by Salina Yoon. This Geisel Honor-winning author/illustrator reintroduces her beloved character Penguin who helps guide a lost baby elephant back to her herd. A lovely tale  about the bonds of friendship that resonate long after separation with simple yet evocative illustrations in bright colors.

“Diary Of A Void” (Viking) by Emi Yagi as translated by David Boyd and Lucy North. A thirty-something Japanese woman gets a new job in Tokyo to escape sexual harassment at her old one. In her new capacity, she finds as the only woman in the office, she is expected to do all the menial tasks. When she invents a story that she is pregnant, she is relieved of these tasks. But how long can she perpetrate this ruse before being discovered?

“Diwali in My New Home” (Beaming Books) by Shachi Kaushik and illustrated by Aishwarya Tandon. A poignant story about an Indian girl’s experience of celebrating Diwali for the first time since coming  to the US. What will be the reception when she introduces this holiday to her neighbors in a new place with those unfamiliar with this traditional holiday?

“A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On” (Columbia) by Dung Kai-Cheung as translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson. “These half-allegorical sketches by a uniquely gifted Hong Kong writer bring to us a nostalgic mosaic of the sights and sounds of a city whose cosmopolitan splendor is fast fading.” – Leo Ou-Fan Lee 

“Fuccboi” (Little Brown), a novel  by Sean Thor Conroe. It’s late 2017, a year after Trump’s election and our main character is broke, bitter and washed up as a failure at everything he’s attempted in life. As he wonders how sustainable is this mode of failure, the reader gets a look at an unvarnished, playful and searching examination of what it means to be a man in today’s world.

“If You Could See The Sun” (Inkyard) is a young adult novel by Ann Liang. In this genre-bending debut, a Chinese American girl monetizes her strange new invisibility powers by discovering and selling her wealthy classmates’ most scandalous secrets. But as the tasks escalate from petty scandals to actual crimes, she must decide if it’s worth losing her conscience for –or even her life.

“The Boy Who Met a Whale”(Peachtree)  by Nizrana Farook. The author of “The Girl Who Stole an Elephant” returns with a tale of  a Sri Lankan fisherboy who gets swept up in a thrilling seafaring adventure, complete with a kidnapping, missing treasure, and a huge blue whale. Set against the vibrant landscape of Sri Lanka, this delightful caper will thrill young fans of adventure with empathetic heroes, missing treasure, and a great beast lurking beneath the waters.

“Never Show a T. Rex a Book” (Kane Miller) by Rashmi Sirdeshpande and illustrated by Diane Ewen. A laugh-out-loud story for kids that’s brimming with imagination, mayhem, and a celebration of the power of books.

“Navigating Chamoru Poetry – Indigeneity, Aestheties, and Declonization” (University of Arizona Press) by Craig Santos Perez. Poet and scholar Perez looks at Indigenous CHamoru poetry from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam) and brings critical attention to a diverse and intergenerational collection of CHamoru poetry and scholarship.

“Boobies” (Groundwood) written and illustrated by Nancy Vo. This Canadian writer/artist approaches the theme of breasts in a refreshing humorous way taking us on a journey from mammals to humans to mountains and the differences and similarities that lie within.

“While I was Away”(Quill Tree) by Waka T. Brown is a young adult non-fiction book. When Waka’s mother suspects her twelve-year old daughter can’t understand basic Japanese, she makes a drastic decision to ship Waka from her rural Kansas home to Tokyo to live with her strict grandmother and reconnect with the culture and master the language. If she’s always been the “smart Japanese girl” in American but is now the “dumb foreigner in Japan, where is home…and who will Waka be when she finds it?

“Lost in the Long March” (Overlook) by Michael X. Wang. This gripping debut novel is set against the backdrop of Mao’s Long March and its aftermath.  It contrasts the intimate with the political, revealing how the history of a country is always the story of its people, even though their stories can be the first to be lost.

“Blanket” (Groundwood) by Ruth Ohi. This is the author’s first wordless picture book that tells the heartfelt, evocative story about those times when you want to hide away from the world — and how much it can mean to have a friend who will stay by your side and keep you company. She does all this with the characters of a sad cat and her friend, the dog.

“Afterparties” (Ecco) – Stories by Anthony Veasna So was the debut short story collection about Cambodian American life that offered insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities. It garnered much praise upon publication even after the author’s untimely death before its publication. Now this summer, it will make its paperback edition debut.

“Fairest” (Penguin) by Meredith Talusan. This book tells the story of a precocious boy with albinism raised in a rural Philippine village who would grow up to become a woman in America. Perceived as white in the U.S., Talusan would go on to Harvard but required a navigation through complex spheres of race, class and sexuality until she found her own place within the gay community.

“Vanished” (University of Nebraska Press) – Stories by Karin Lin Greenberg. Winner of the RAZ/Schumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, this book tells the story of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by those around them. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life, each deals with something or someone who has vanished – a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship – as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.

“Golden Age” (Astra House) is a novel by the late Wang Xiaobo as translated by Yan Yan. When a rumor surfaces that a man is having an affair with a woman in a Chinese village, a 21 year-old ox herder is shamed by local authorities and forced to write a confession for his crimes. Instead, he takes it upon himself to write a modernist literary tract. A leading icon of his generation, Xiabo’s cerebral and sarcastic narrative is a reflection on the failures of individuals and the enormous political, social and personal changes that traumatized 20th century China.

“People From Bloomington” (Penguin Classics) by Budi Darma. Translated by Tiffany Bao. This is the first English translation of a short story collection about Americans in Mid-west America by one of Indonesia’s most beloved writers. Set in Bloomington where the author lived as a grad student in the 1970s. In an eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic portrait, the author paints a picture of the  cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relations to one another.

“And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilivered Vase of Moonlight” (Wave) by Lynn Xu. This unique book-length poem is part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part international for the world-historical surrealist insurgency and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth.

“Complicit” (Atria) is a novel by Winnie M. Li. It tells the story of a young but eager daughter of Chinese immigrants who takes a lowly but coveted position at a New York film production company. Gradually she works her way up the ladder only to see her dream crumble to dust. Ten years pass and when a reporter appears, investigating the director she once worked for before quitting the business – she must decide what to do. Does she tell the world her story? Does she want revenge? And can she face her own involvement in her downfall?

“Beating Heart Baby” (Flatiron) by Lio Min is a tender friends-to-enemies-to lovers story with AAPI leads, celebrates first love, second chances, indie rock and transitions in life of many kinds. An anime-influenced, young adult, queer coming-of-age love story not without complications and  challenges.

“House of Sticks”(Scribner),a memoir by Ly Tran. The author weaves together her family’s immigration experience with her own fraught and courageous coming-of-age to form a portrait of one girl’s struggle to reckon with her heritage and forge her own singular path.

“Solo Dance” (World Editions) by Li Kotomi is an important queer Chinese-Japanese novelist who as a millennial paints a picture of growing up in today’s Japan and Taiwan and his efforts to find a place for himself in a  this shifting, confusing landscape. Translated by Arthur Reiji Morris.

“A Mermaid Girl” (Viking) by Sana Rafi and illustrated by Olivia Aserr.  When a Muslim girl enters the water at a community pool in her yellow birkini, she is met with skepticism. But when her mother instills confidence in the tradition of her family, she begins to shine.

“Chinatown” (New Directions) by Thuan. An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it’s a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby with her son, begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in Communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon’s Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between the, she has not seen for eleven years.

“Tomorrow In Shanghai” (Blair) by May-Lee Chai is a book of short stories that explores multicultural complexities through the lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tackling the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. Essential reading for  an increasingly globalized world.

“Bloom and other poems”(New Directions) by Xi Chuan as translated from the Chinese by Lucas Klein. This poet delves into the incongruities of daily existence—its contradictions and echoes of ancient history—with sensuous exaltations and humorous observation.  Melding lyrical beauty with philosophical intensity, the collection ends with a conversation between the poet and the writer Xu Zhiyuan.

“I Guess I Live Here Now” (Viking) by Claire Ahn. When Melody and her mother are suddenly forced to leave New York to join her father in Seoul, she is resentful and homesick. But she adjusts into her fashionable Korean lifestyle until cracks begin to appear on its glittering surface. The story is a revealing exposure of who and what “home” really is.

“Kundo Wakes Up” (Tordotcom) by Saad Z. Hossain. “Cyberpunk, high fantasy, climate catastrophe, and at its heat, a compelling story about broken people finding each other and a way to become whole again.” –Samit Basu. A companion to the Ignite  And Lucus Award-nominated novella “The Gurkha And The Lord Of Tuesday”.

“Sewing Love – Handmade  Clothes for Any Body” (Sasquatch) by Sanae Ishida, author of  “Sewing Happiness”. Learning to create and customize your own patterns empowers you to make exactly the kinds of clothes you want, and it solves the fit issues of ready-to-wear clothing (and even commercial patterns) designed to fit one “ideal” body type.  Take a journey to loving the body you have, as you learn to sew beautiful, simple handmade clothes.

“UNNIE” by Yun-Yun is inspired by a true tragedy. Yun-Young’s sister who was a secondary school teacher and was one of those who go missing during the sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea in 2014. Yun-young and the family await word of her rescue or that her body has been found. Yet no news comes as the days, months and years go by. Yun-Young’s sorrow feels poisoned. She can’t move on with her life without understanding her sister’s life. Thus begins a journey to discover who her sister really was.

“Zachary Ying And The Dragon Emperor” (McElderry Books) by xiran  Jay Zhao.Zachary Ying had never had many opportunities to learn about his Chinese heritage. His single mom was busy enough making sure they got by, and his schools never taught anything except Western history and myths. So Zack is woefully unprepared when he discovers he was born to host the spirit of the First Emperor of Chin for a vital mission. To save the mortal realm, a young hero must journey into a world where myth and history collide.

From the winner of the Philippine National Book Award for Fiction comes the novel entitled “The Betrayed” (Europa) by Reine Arcache Melvin. This book tells the story of two sisters who love the same man. As dictatorship and political upheaval ravage the Philippines, the sisters’ conflicting passions threaten to lead them to betray not only each other, but all that their father stood for.

“COSPLAY – The Fictional Mode of Existence” (Minnesota) by Frenchy Lunning. Flourishing far beyond its Japanese roots, cosplay has become an international phenomenon with fervid fans who gather at enormous, worldwide conventions annually. Lunning offers an intimate, sensational tour through cosplay’s past and present, as well as its global lure.

“Bronze Drum – A Novel Of Sisters And War” (Grand Central) by Phong Nguyen. This is a fictionalized account of the true story of the Trung sisters, shared in Vietnam through generations for thousands of years. A tale of women warriors who rise  up against the oppressive rule of the Han Chinese, ushering in a new period of freedom and independence.

“TSUCHI: Earthy Materials In Contemporary Japanese Art” (University of Minnesota Press) by Bert Winther-Tamaki. This book is an examination of Japanese contemporary art through the lens of ecocriticism and environmental history. Collectively referred to by the word “tsuchi”, earthy materials such as soil and clay are prolific in Japanese contemporary art. Highlighting works of photography, ceramics, and installation art, the author explores the many aesthetic manifestations of “tsuchi” and their connection to the country’s turbulent environmental history, investigating how Japanese artists have continually sought a passionate and redemptive engagement with the earth.

“Fierce And Fearless –Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Congress”(NYU Press) by Gwendolyn Mink. “This book chronicles Mink’s transformative leadership as she fought for ethnic, racial, gender, and environmental justice-and an end to war – even as she encountered systemic discrimination, physical and psychological abuse, and betrayal by her party. This gripping narrative illuminates the extraordinary policy accomplishments and the astounding personal costs of a principled and path breaking life in U.S. politics.” Excerpted from a quote from author Mary Hawkesworth.

“Taste Tibet – Family Recipes from the Himalayas” (Interlink Publishing) by Jule Kleeman & Yeshi Jampa.  Nourishing, simple, seasonal food that heals as well as fuels might be popular today but it has been traditional in Tibet for over 8,000 years. This book offers over 80 recipes from the Tibetan Plateau, written for today’s home cook. Alongside the recipes, stories are interwoven of a Tibetan childhood in Tibet.

“Dream of the Divided Field” (One World)  by Yanyi. “Here is a book of the body, a book like no other: tender and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences. This is a book to read when we wake in the middle of the night and need a voice that is filled with longing, triuth, and the delight of being, despite all the painful odes” – excerpted from a quote by Ilya Kaminsky.

“Activities Of Daily Living” (Norton) is a novel by Lisa Hsiao Chen. Built around the performance art of Tehching Hsieh and the act of witnessing the end of a father’s life, our narrator struggles with issues of time, death, illness and the making of art and its symbiotic relationship to everyday life.

“Self-Portrait With Ghost” (Mariner) by Meng Jin (publication date of July 5, 2022) is a new book of short stories by the author of “Little Gods”. Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the beginning of the pandemic, this book explores intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. The stories move between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, this collection considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, with seemingly endless access to knowledge, but to have little actual power.

“The Noh Family” (Kokila) by Grace K. Shim. A Korean American teenage girl in Tilsa, Oklahoma is obsessed with K-dramas but she gets a real shock when she learns she’s related to an extended family on her deceased father’s side. When an invitation is extended, she is exposed to this family’s luxurious life-style. While the grandmother is welcoming, the rest of the family gives her the cold shoulder. What deep, dark secrets are hiding in this family’s closet?

“Japan’s Best Friend – Dog Culture In The Land Of The Rising Sun” (Prestel) by Manami Okazaki. For thousands of years, dogs have played a crucial role in Japanese society. This profusely color illustrated book looks at the country’s love affair with canines, exploring how they are represented through local traditions, as well as the extraordinary lengths to which they are exalted within pop culture.

“Only the Cat knows” (Red Hen Press) is a novella by Ruyan Meng. This harrowing and extraordinary story, based on a true event, is part of a series of tales illuminating the microcosm of all humanity contained in a typical Chinese “worker village” in the 70s. Here, an exploited young factory worker has nothing to live for beyond a frail chance of a pay raise. When it  never  happens, he feels trapped between his family and official greed, indifference, and corruption.

“The Interrogation Rooms Of The Korean War – The Untold History” (Princeton) by Monica Kim. “This is a deeply researched and insightful book. Drawing on a parade of fascinating characters, surprising scenes, and recently declassified material. Kim casts a fresh, innovativ1e light on the Korean War and shows how the ideological struggle in prisoner-of-war camps and their interrogation rooms became the final front line of a pivotal American conflict.” – Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. 

“Kin Thai – Modern Thai recipes to Cook at Home” (Hardie Grant)  by John Chantarasak. The title translates as “Eat Thai” and is a collection of accessible, modern and classic recipes from one of London’s leading chefs. Influenced by his Thai and British heritage, Chantarasak shines a light on lesser-known Thai cuisine as well as the more popular dishes by exploring the use of western ingredients to achieve the flavors synonymous with Thai food. With over 60 delicious recipes and accompanying photography, “Kin Thai” is a celebration of the culture, cooking techniques and flavors of Thailand.

“Scatterted All Over The Earth” (New Directions) by Yoko Tawada as translated by Margaret Mitsutani. In this novel, the world’s climate disaster and its attendant refugee crisis are viewed through the loving twin lenses of friendship and linguistic ingenuity. In the not-too-distant future, Japan as a country has vanished. Hiroko, a former citizen and climate refugee  teaches immigrant children in Denmark. As she searches for anyone who  an still speak her native tongue, she makes new friends through her travels.

 “Troubling the Water – A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia” (Potomac Books – University of Nebraska Press) by Abby Seiff. A eulogy to Cambodia’s once magnificent Tonle Sap Lake and the water culture of Cambodia and how it was destroyed by global warming, a dam and the greed of people.

“Love Decoded” (Razobill) by Jennifer Yen. When the niece of a professional matchmaker gets it in her head to create a fun-friend-making app online, it goes viral. But when this success turns into a major scandal and threatens her relationship with her best friends, this teenage girl is put in a dilemma only she can solve, but can she really?

“Winter Love” (McNally Editions) by Han Suyin. This short novel by the author of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” recalls a love affair between two women at the end of WWII in war-torn London.

“The Last Ryu” (Levine Querido) by Emi Watanabe Cohen. Kohei has never seen a big dragon in real life like his grandpa says he has. But when his grandfather falls seriously ill, Kohei goes off on a journey to find this dragon with the help of friends.

“Woman Running in The Mountains” (NYRB) by Yuko Tsushima with an introduction by Lauren Groff as translated by Geraldine Harcourt. A young single mother seeks refuge in the company of other women, then ventures beyond the city into the countryside towards a mountain that captures her imagination and desire for a wilder freedom.

“Tokyo Dreaming” (Flatiron) by Emiko Jean is the sequel to “Tokyo Ever After” in which a common Japanese American family learn their connection to Japanese royalty and a teenage girl becomes a princess. But just as her parents are about to be married, the Imperial Household questions their pedigree. What can she do if playing the perfect princess means sacrificing her own path and the failure to follow her own heart. 

“Racist Love – Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy” (Duke) by Leslie Bow. The author traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love”, she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects.

“Fish Swimming In Dappled Sunlight” (Bitter Lemon) by Riku Onda as translated by Alison Watts. Set in Tokyo over the course of one night, a couple meets for one last time before breaking up. Their relationship broken down by the death of their guide on a mountain trek, each believes the other to be a murderer.

“All the Flowers Kneeling” (Penguin)  by Paul Tran. Visceral and astonishing, this debut book of poetry investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and US imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power and control.

“Peasprout Chen – Battle of Champions” (Henry Holt) by Henry Lien. Now in her second year at Pearl Famous Academy of Skate and Sword, Peasprout Chen tries to reclaim her place as champion of wu liu, the deadly and beautiful sport of martial arts figure skating. But Peasprout faces a surprising threat. As Peasprout guides her mission to save a kingdom, she must learn what it truly means to be a leader.

“Vulgar Beauty – Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium” (Duke) by Mila Zuo. In this book, Zuo offers a new theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by showing how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture start to produce a feeling of Chineseness.

“Disorientation” (Penguin Press) by Elaine Hsieh Chou tells the unforgettable story of a Chinese American grad student trying to finish a dissertation on a late canonical Chinese poet and be done with the cultural thing. A curious note in the archives leads to an explosive discovery that sets off a rollercoaster of mishaps and mis-adventures. A blistering send-up  of privilege and power in America.

“All About Vietnam – Projects & Activities for kids” (Tuttle) by Phuoc Thi Minh Tran as illustrated by Dong Nguyen & Hop Thi Nguyen, In this lavishly detailed picture book, children will get an inside look at Vietnam’s vibrant culture, while learning through fun, hands-on games, songs, and activities. This multicultural children’s book is a great fit for story time at home or in a classroom.

“Climate Lyricism” (Duke) by Min Hyoung Song looks at how climate change affects the work of American authors as varied as Frank O’Hara, Tonny Pico, Sholmaz Sharif, Kazuo Ishigoro and others. This is a powerfully argued case for literature and poetry as a way of cultivating sustained attention to climate change in this tumultuous time.

“Birds of Paradise Lost” (Red Hen Press) by Andrew Lam is a collection of short stories that looks at what happened to the “Boat People” who escaped after the fall of Saigon.

“My Mechanical Romance” (Holiday House) by Alexene Farol Follmuth. When Bel accidentally reveals her talent for engineering, she finds herself a loner in her school’s legendary robotics club. Fortunately, Mateo who is captain of the club recognizes Bel as a potential asset. As competition heats up for national competition, the two form a closer relationship. This YA novel explores the challenges girls of color face in STEM and the vulnerability of first love with wit and honesty.

“Eighteen Vats of Water” (Creston) by Ji-Li Jiang as illustrated by Nadia Hsieh.  The award-winning author of “Red Scarf Girl” returns with another story of Chinese culture and history. Xian has always wanted to be a great calligrapher like his father. As he studies, Xian learns how much work and creativity go into what look like effortless strokes. Based on actual history, this book is about creativity, learning to see, and determination, as well as the importance of family traditions.

“Love Decoded” (Razorbill) by Jennifer Yen. A young adult novel about a teenage girl creates a friend-making app to earn a shot to represent her school and the chance at a prestigious tech internship. Trouble is, the app becomes a major scandal and ends up hurting her friends. How can she salvage her friendships?

“When I’m Gone, Look For Me In The East” (Pantheon) by Quan Barry. From the acclaimed author of “We Ride Upon Sticks” comes her new novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? This novel is an examination of our individual struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting simply what is.

“And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight” (Wave) by Lynn Xu. This book-length poem is epic yet intimate and in various shades of design that unrolls itself across the page s it spreads its words like seeds in the wind. Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part international for the world-historical surrealist insurgency and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth.

“Tokyo Dreaming” (Flatiron Books) by Emiko Jean is a sequel to the bestseller “Tokyo Ever After”. When Japanese American teenager Izumi Tanaka learns that her father was the Crown Prince of Japan, she goes to Tokyo to finally find a place she belongs. When it appears that she will have a royal wedding and marry her bodyguard turned boyfriend, things turn awry.  Her parents are breaking up, the Imperial Household Council refuses to approve the marriage and her boyfriend makes a shocking decision about their relationship. Will Izumi pull it all together.

“Peach Blossom Spring” (Little, Brown) by Melissa Fu. It is 1938 in China, and Meilin, a young wife, has a bright future. But when the Japanese army approaches, Meilin and her four-year old son, Renshu are forced to flee their home. Years later, Renshu has settled in America as Henry Dao. Though his daughter, Lily, is desperate to understand her heritage, he refuses to talk about his childhood. Spanning continents and generations, this book is a look at the history of China, told through the journey of one family.

“CURB” (Nightboat) by Divya Victor won the 2022 Pen Open Book Award. These poems document how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living undergirded by violence. It bears  witness to immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting within the context of nationalist and white-supremicist violence against South Asians. 

“The Verifiers” (Vintage) is a novel by Jane Pek. Claudia Lin is an amateur sleuth who verifies people’s online lives and lies for a dating detective agency in New York. Things go smoothly until a client with an unusual request goes missing. She breaks protocol to investigate—and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit. Part literary mystery and part family story, this novel offers an incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices, and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.

“Set On You” (Berkley) by Amy Lea is a romance novel that follows the life of a fitness instructor who after a recent break-up takes solace in the gym, her place of power and positivity. That calm turns competitive when a firefighter enters the gym and the two begin to spar.

“Red Thread Of Fate” (Berkley) by Lyn Liao Butler is a story of loss and recovery and a powerful message about the ties of family. After the tragic death of her husband and cousin on the eve of their adoption of a son from China, things get complicated. Tam Kwan finds herself a widow and sudden mother. She is named the guardian of the cousin’s five- year-old daughter without her knowledge. Now, Tam must decide if she will complete the adoption on her own and bring home the son waiting for her in a Chinese orphanage.

“Sunday Funday in Koreatown” (Holiday House) written and illustrated by Aram Kim. Yoomi has big plans for her day – make kimbap for breakfast, wear her favorite shirt, get her favorite books from the library and visit Grandma with her dad. But nothing goes right. This charming picture book shows how even when things don’t turn out the way you want to, the day can be rewarding. This is a story of resilience, family, and Korean culture.

“The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void” (Nightboat) by Jackie Wang. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unsconscious, Wang’s poetry emphasizes the social dimensions of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.

“Search History” (Coffee House Press) is a novel by Eugene Lim. Frank is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices and enemies pursues the mysterious canine.

“A Magic Steeped In Poison” (Feiwei & Friends) by Judy I. Lin. When Ning realizes it was she who unknowingly brewed the poison tea that killed her mother and now threatens to take away her sister too, she is beside herself. But she takes on the challenge to find the kingdom’s true masters of the magical art of tea-making for the princess will grant a favor to the winner. A favor she hopes will save her sister.

“The Trees Witness  Everything” (Copper Canyon Press) by Victoria Chang. This latest book of poetry by Chang balances the Japanese traditional from of tankas to grab at the core of the world. Largely insipid by the poet W.S. Merwin, she explores the self and how it abuts nature, often running through that boundary entirely.

“Aerial Concave Without Cloud” (Nightboat) by Sueyeun Juliette Lee. This is a collection steeped in the bluest apocalypse light of solar collapse and the pale, ghostly light of personal devastation.nr Lee channels and interprets the language of starlight through her body into poetic form.

“Hana Hsu And The Ghost Crab Nation” (Razorbill)  by Sylvia Liu. Desperate to figure out what’s going on, Hana and her friends find themselves spying on one of the most powerful corporations in the country – and the answers about the mystery could be closer to home than Hana’s willing to accept. Will she be able to save her friends – and herself – from a conspiracy that threatens everything she knows?

“Cadenzas” (Redbat Books) by Alex Kuo. This is a unique, double-sided work of fiction that narrates a conversation between music and languge, with walkins by Dorothy Parker, Dante, Edith Sitwell, J.S. Bach, Qiu Jin, Dmitri Shostakovich and June Jordan. It is Alex Kuo’s accumulation of more than eighty years of living, listening, and writing on several continents and breathing in the cadences of several languages, including three Chinese dialects.

 “Loveboat Reunion” (Harper Teen) by Abigail Hing Wen. A couple teenagers emerge from a tumultuous past in which hearts were broken and revenge was plotted but all is forgiven as they become friends Determined to forge a future, Sophia has college plans and Xavier plays the waiting game, hoping to dodge his overbearing father long enough to collect his trust fund when he turns eighteen. But obstacles are in their way, can they succeed together or are they destined to combust?  Find out in this young adult romance novel.

 “Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest” (Groundwood) by Uma Krishnaswami as illustrated by Christopher Corr. In this colorfully illustrated picture book, the author lets the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and mountain climber Edmund Hillary both tell their story as they ascend Mt. Everest.

“Back To Japan – The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter, Kunihiko Moriguchi” (Other Press) by Marc Pettijean and translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. This book describes the life and art of a master Kimono painter and Living National Treasure whose influences ranged from the Paris art scene of the1960s to the Japanese world of tradition where he began to contemporize the craft of yuzen (resist dyeing) through his innovative use of abstraction in patterns.

“Maizy Chen’s Last Chance” (Random House) by Lisa Yee. A Chinese American teenage girl finds herself in a small all-white town where her family’s Chinese restaurant has been around for years. But something’s not right. A family treasure is missing and someone has left a racist note. This book is a tribute to Chinese Americans and to immigrant families, and an unforgettable celebration of love, belonging and asking hard questions.

“The Village Of Eight Graves” (Pushkin Vertigo) by Seishi Yokomizo as translated by Bryan Karenyk. A mountain village called “Eight Graves” takes its name from a centuries-old massacre. When a young man arrives from the city to claim a mysterious inheritance and death follows in his wake, the villagers suspicions fall upon the newcomer. The young man must rely on the help of detective Kosuke Kindaichi to uncover the murderer and save his own reputation before the villagers take justice into their own hands.

“Brother’s Keeper” (Holiday House) by Julie Lee. Its 1950 in North Korea and everything is restricted. A family prepares to flee but war breaks out. Only the twelve year old daughter and her mother’s eight-year old son can make it out to escape to the South.  They face insurmountable obstacles as they begin this journey.

“The Dreamweavers” (Holiday House) by  G. Z. Schmidt. As Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, 12 year olds Mei and Yun Wu are excited as the Emperor of China’s son comes to their village to sample their grandfather’s incredible moon cakes. But when disaster strikes that night, these kids are left to their own devices on how to rescue their grandfather and village from a terrible fate. A middle-age novel  for youngsters.

 “The Wishing Tree” (Harper) by Meika Hashimoto and illustrated by Xindi Yan. This picture book tries to depict the spirit of giving and the spirit of xmas in a young child and how it lights up a whole town.

 “The Grandmaster’s Daughter” (Green Willow) by Dan-ah Kim. In a small quiet village sits a martial arts school where the daughter of the grandmaster must teach as well as learn from every daily task. Colorful illustrations enhance this picture book.

 “Love and Reparation – A Theatrical Response To  The Section 377 Litigation In India” (Seagull Books) by Danish Sheikh. On 6 September 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. ‘LGBT persons,’ the Court said, ‘deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being “unapprehended felons”.’ But how definitive was this end? The playwright navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic in these two plays.

“It All Comes Back To You” (Quill Tree) by Farah Naz Rishi. For fans of “Pride & Prejudice” comes an enemies-to-lovers rom com about first love and second chances by this Pakistani American YA novelist.

 “Rouge Street – Three Novellas” (Metropolitan Books) by Shuang Xuetao and translated by Jeremy Tiang.  With an introduction by Chinese Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien. An  inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks. These are the characters that populate the world of this writer who evokes the voice of people from China’s frigid northeast in Shenyang, China. A gritty region once an industrial hub but now weighed down by unemployment, poverty, alchoholism, domestic violence, divorce and suicide.

“Word Travelers And The Taj Mahal Mystery” (Sourcebooks) by Raj Haldar and illustrated by Neha Rawat. Best friends Eddies and MJ are going to play outside, create an obstacle course for MJ’s newts, watch their favorite movies and then travel to India to solve a mystery and save a kingdom.

 “Touring The Land of The Dead” (Europa Editons) by Maki Kashimada as translated by Haydin Trowell. This book consists of two novellas that concern memory, loss and love. The title story invokes a woman who takes her chronically ill husband to a spa, the site of a former luxury hotel that her grandfather had taken her mother to when she was small. “Ninety-Nine Kisses” portrays the lives of four unmarried sisters in a close-knit neighborhood of Tokyo. Inspired by Tanizaki’s “The Makioka Sisters”.

 “Longing and Other Stories” (Columbia University Press) by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki.  Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century and known for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. He is acclaimed for postwar novels such as “The Makioka Sisters” and “The Key”. This book presents three early stories of family life from the first decade of the author’s career. Translated by Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy.

“Pillar of Books – The Moon Country Korean Poetry Series” (Black Ocean) by Moon Bo Young as translated by Hedgie Choi. Still in her early 30’s, Young is part of a younger generation of poets in South Korea. As Kim Na-Young, judge of the Kim Soo-Young Prize awarded to this volume said, “The work of witnessing and representing life is so easily marred and thwarted by the anxieties and loneliness present in each of our lives, and yet, this poet looks squarely at the world, presenting the truth in it with such solidity and composure that I can’t help but root for her and the new language she discovers in the process.” 

“Winter Phoenix – Testimonies In Verse” (Deep Vellum) by Sophia Terazawa.  A book of testimonies in verse, this book is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?”

 “The One Thing You’d Save” (Clarion) by Linda Sue Park and illustrated by Robert Sae-Heng.  In this book, a Newbery medalist poses a provocative question about what matters most. Students talk, argue and stand by their choices as they discover unexpected facets of one another—and of themselves. With insight and humor, Park captures the voices of an inclusive classroom in verse inspired by the Korean poetry form sijo.

“Murakami T – The T-Shirts I Love” (Knopf) by Haruki Murakami. Photographs of Murakami’s T-shirt collection are paired with short, frank essays that include his musings on the joy of drinking Guinness in local Irish pubs, the pleasure of eating a burger upon arrival in the United States and Hawaiian surf culture in the 1980s.

In “Gamma Draconis” (Titan Comics), acclaimed artist Eldo Yoshimizu teams up with writer Benoist Simmat to create a dazzling crime tale of a Japanese heroine who takes on a sinister crime organization.

The Gleaner Song – Selected Poems” (Deep Vellum) by Song Lin as translated by Dong Li. Song Lin is one of China’s most innovative poets. When the Tianamen protest exploded in Beijing, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai for which he was imprisoned for almost a year. Leaving China, this selection of poems spans four decades of exploration with a focus on poems written in France, Singapore and Argentina and more recently, his return to China.

“Leilong the Library Bus” (Gecko Press) by Julia Liu and illustrated by Bei Lynn. This award-winning book from Taiwan translated by Helen Wang tells the charming tale of a dinosaur who loves books and story time. Unfortunately his huge size causes problems when he tries to enter the library with the kids. How the problem is solved and how the dinosaur becomes an ambassador of library books is cleverly and humorously resolved in this picture book that parents will enjoy reading to their kids.

 “Wombat” (Candlewick) by Christopher Cheng and illustrated by Liz Duthie. This picture book teaches kids about the wombat, Australia’s “bulldozer of the bush.”

“The Wedding Party” (Amazon Crossing) by Liu Xinwu and translated by Jeremy Tiang. A wedding party is planned in a Beijing courtyard. Set at a pivotal point after the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, Xinwu’s tale weaves together a rich tapestry of characters, intertwined lives, and stories within stories. A touching, hilarious portrait  of life in this crowded city.

“The Secret Listener – An Ingenue In Mao’s Court” (Oxford)  by Yuan-Tsung Chen tells the fascinating tale of an extraordinary life in a tumultuous China from the 1920s to the 1970s. It’s a vivid, compelling portrait of life, conflict and love among the elite and downtrodden circles in the Republican and Communist eras.

Newbery Medal winner Erin Entrada Kelly makes her middle-age level debut which she illustrates herself with “Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey” (HarperCollins). It’s a story about friendship and being brave when you feel shy or shaky.

 “Bodhi Sees the World – Thailand” (bala kids) is written and illustrated by Marisa Aragon Ware. A young girl finds herself in a foreign city, exploring the streets of Bangkok where she begins to experience the world through a new culture.

“The School For Good Mothers” (Simon & Schuster) is a novel by Jessamine Chan. A taut thriller of a story about a mother who struggles to get her daughter back under the punishing scrutiny and judgment aimed at mothers everywhere – especially against those who aren’t wealthy or white.

“Dragon Legend – The Dragon Realm Series, Book 2” (Sterling) by  Katie & Kevin Tsang. When a friend is kidnapped and taken through a time portal, Billy Chan and his friends must travel through time on their dragons to save him in this middle-grade level adventure novel.

 “Scars of War – The Politics of Paternity  and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam” (University of Nebraska Press) by Sabrina Thomas. This book explores ideas of race, nation, and gender in the aftermath of war. Thomas exposes the contradictory approach of policymakers unable to reconcile Amerasian biracialism with the U.S. Code. As they created an inclusionary discourse deeming Amerasians worthy of American action, guidance, and humanitarian aid, federal policymakers simultaneously initiated exclusionary policies that designated these people unfit for American citizenship. 

“India Mahdavi” (Chronicle) is the first monograph on this world-renowned, award-winning Iranian interior designer. Along with her design projects, the book highlights her custom furniture, lighting, accessories and brand collaborations in a visually stunning design that sets off the work.

“Of Arcs And Circles – Insights from Japan  on Gardens, Nature and Art” (Stone Bridge Press) by Marc Peter Keane. From his vantage point as a garden designer and writer based in Kyoto, the author examines the world around him an delivers insights on the Japanese garden, the meaning of art and other fascinating topics.

“Happy Diwali” (Henry Holt) by Sanyukta Mathur and Courtney Pippin-Mathur. Pippin-Mathur also did the illustrations This radiant picture book celebrates Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

“Borderless – A Memoir Of A  Young Revolutionary In The 21st Century” (Wake Up Press) by Gary Pak. A fifteen-year-old revolutionary of mixed  ethnicities, narrates this story of promise and opportunity in a post-captitalist/post-imperialist country formerly part of the USA. Join this teenager and his sister on a journey through a city devastated by earthquakes and breed, but during a time when a new world of sharing and equality is being built from the ashes of the old.

“Ready for the Spotlight” (Candlewick) written and illustrated by Jaime Kim. This picture book demonstrates the sometimes competitive but always loving relationship between two sisters who shine in different ways. Little sister trains hard to be a ballerina but is always overshadowed by her big sister who gets the leading role.

 “Roxy The Unisaurus Rex presents Oh NO! The Talent Show” (Feiwel & Friends) by Eva Chen and illustrated by Matthew Rivera.  The annual talent show is coming. Many dinosaurs have brilliant skills to show off but Dexter feels like he has no talent at all. With encouragement from Roxy, he learns being a good friend could be the most important talent of all.

 “Where Is Bena Bear?” (Henry Holt)  written and illustrated by Mike Curato. Tiny is having a party but the bear is nowhere to be found. Searching for Bina, Tiny realizes something is wrong and sets out to make it right. A humorous picture book about friendship, understanding and embracing our loved ones  just as they are (even if they are painfully shy).

“American Home” (Autumn House Press) by Sean Cho A. won the 2020 Autumn House Chapbook Prize. The poems reflect a keen eye on everyday occurrences and how these small events shape us as individuals.

 “Genghis Chan on Drums” (Omnidawn),  poems by John Yau. This noted arts writer and poet returns in his latest book to his alter-ego of Genghis Chan and lacerates with acerbic humor and wit the  topics of the day, clichés about being Chinese, the language of philosophers and the residue of racism and popular culture.

“Usha and the Big Digger” (Charlesbridge) by Amitha Jagannath Knight and illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat. Part of the “storytelling Math” series in which books depict children using math as they play, build, and discover the world around them. When two kids look up at the seven stars in the sky, they see different things. One sees the Big Dipper and another sees the Big Digger and a cousin sees the Big Kite. What exactly is going on?

“Anzu The Great Kaiju” (Roaring Brook Press) written and illustrated by Benson Shum. All great Kaiju are born with a superpower to strike fear into the heart of their city but Anzu is different. Instead of mayhem, he likes mayflowers. Instead of striking fear, he prefers to be sincere. Can Anzu find a way to make his family proud and still stay true to himself. From this Disney illustrator comes this heartwarming book about making your own way and the unexpected power of gentleness.

“Idol Gossip” (Walker) by Alexander Leigh Young. A Korean American girl from San Francisco goes from singing lessons to a K-pop boot camp when she and her mom move to Seoul. This debut YA novel is all about dreaming big but staying true to your own values.

 “Brown Boy Nowhere” (Skyscape) by Sheeryl Lim. When a 16 year old Filipino American boy is uprooted from his San Diego home to the middle of nowhere just as he plans to enter a big skateboarding competition, he can’t help but think that “life sucks”. And now he’s the only Asian in an all-white school. But being an outcast has its rewards when he bands together with the rest of his high school outsiders.

 “Remembering Our Intimacies – Modelo, Aloha Aina, and Ea” (University of Minnesota Press) by Jamaica Healimeleikalani Osorio. Hawaiian “aloha ‘aina” is often described in Western political terms as nationalism, nationhood, or even patriotism. In this book, the author focuses on the personal and embodied articulations of aloha aina to detangle it from the effects of colonialism and occupation.

“Faraway” (Columbia University Press) by Taiwanese novelist Lo Yi-Chin and translated by Jeremy Tiang. A Taiwanese man finds himself stranded in mainland China while attempting to bring his comatose father home. He finds himself locked into a protracted struggle with byzantine hospital regulations while dealing with relatives he barely knows. A book that examines  the rift between Taiwan and China on the most personal of levels.

“Manifest Technique – Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture” (University of Illinois) by Mark R. Villegas. Filipino Americans have been innovators and collaborators in hip hop since the culture’s early days. But despite some success, the genre’s significance in Filipino American communities is often overlooked. The author takes into consideration the coast-to-coast hip hop scene to reveal how Filipino Americans have used music, dance, and visual art to create their worlds.

“Enforced Rustification In The Chinese Cultural Revolution” (Texas Review Press) by Jianqing Zheng sounds like an academic study when it actually is a poetic retelling of the author’s experience working in the countryside as a young student. It’s told in poems full of humor, wit and poignancy.

“This Jade World” (University of Nebraska Press) by Ira Sukrungruang , Thai American poet and writer, chronicles a year of mishap, exploration, experimentation, self-discovery, and eventually, healing. It questions the very nature of love and heartbreak, uncovering the vulnerability of being human.

“Personal Attention Roleplay” (Metonymy Press) – Stories by  Helen Chau Bradley. A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with an overworked mother. A  newly-queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels in the summer heat. These tales offer portrayals of awkward interactions and isolations of a generation, community and culture.

“Pure Invention – How Japan Made The Modern World” (Crown) by Matt Alt. Japan is the forge of the world’s fantasies: karaoke and the Walkman, manga and anime, Pac-Man, online imageboards and emojis. But in this book,  a Japan media reporter proves in his investigation, these novelties did more than entertain, they paved the way for our perplexing modern lives.

 “ABC Of Feelings”(Philomel) written and illustrated by Bonnie Lui. This picture book is a journey through the alphabet that shows kids it’s perfectly okay to feel many different things, sometimes all at once. The perfect read-aloud for little ones learning all about feelings and their ABC’s.

“Beasts Of A Little Land” (Ecco) is a novel by Juhea Kim. It is an epic story of love, war, and redemption set again the backdrop of the Korean independence movement. From the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s.

First published in 1937, Genzaburo Yoshino’s “How Do You Live?” (Algonquin) has long been acknowledged in Japan as a crossover classic for young readers and a favorite of Academy Award-winning anime director Hayao Miyazaki who will base his final film on the book. With a foreword by Neil Gaiman and translated by Bruno Navasky, the story involves a young boy who loses his father at the age of fifteen and the journal entries he receives from his uncle about life’s big questions.

“Goodbye, again – essays, reflections, and illustrations” (Harper Perennial) by Jonny Sun. The author of “everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too” returns with this offering of meditative essays, short humor pieces and memorable one-liners covering topics such as loneliness and burnout, advice on caring for dying houseplants, and a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.

“Faultlines” (Custom House) by Emily Itani. A bittersweet love story of a bored Japanese housewife in a dilemma who  must make choices and a piercing portrait of female identity.

“Outside Voices, Please” (Cleveland University Press) is a new book of poetry by Valerie Hsiung due out October 5, 2021. “Hsiung orchestrates a symphony of voices, past, present, and prescient: time (and with it, history) compresses and expands, yielding long poetry sequences reminiscent of Myung Mi Kim’s sonic terrains and C.D. Wright’s documentary poetics.” – Diana Khoi Nguyen

“Heaven” (Europa Editions) by Mieko Kawakmi. From the best-selling author of “Breasts And Eggs”, a striking exploration of working women’s daily lives in Japan comes a new story of the experience of a teenage boy who is tormented by his schoolmates. It explores the meaning and experience of violence and the consolations of friendship. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

 “Alma Presses Play” (Make Me A World) by Tina Cane. Alma is a half-Chinese and half-Jewish teenage girl going through changes with her Walkman on most of the time. Friends move away, love comes and goes and her parents divorce. In this world of confusing beginnings, middles, and endings, is Alma ready to press play on the soundtrack of her life?

 “Japanese Dress in Detail (Thames & Hudson/Victoria & Albert Museum) by Josephine Rout is the catalog for an exhibition held in Britain in 2020. It brings together more than 100 items of clothing and reveals the intricacies of Japanese dress from the 18th century to the present and includes garments for women, men and children. The details have been selected for their exquisite beauty and craftsmanship and for how much they impart about the wearer’s identity. 

A Way of Looking” (Silverfish Review Press) by Jianqing Zheng. Winner of the 2019  Gerald Cable Book Award.  Zheng, shaped by the Cultural Revolution in China somehow ended up in Mississippi and fell in love with the blues and in this book, he takes the haiga Japanese literary form (one prose journal entry followed by the echo of a haiku poem to end it) and plants it in the deep south. autumn night/a freight train chugging/across the Yazoo.

 “XOXO” (Harper Teen) by Axie Oh. A teenage romance that blossoms in L.A. and re-ignites in Seoul. A Korean American girl meets a Korean guy on his last day in the city of angels and sparks fly. But she forgets about him when he flies off to Seoul. But when the girl and her mother fly to Seoul to take care of an ailing grandmother, guess who she discovers is in her class. But he is not an ordinary guy, he’s in one of the most popular K-pop bands in the land. And in K-pop, dating is strictly forbidden. Read the book if you want to find out how this complex relationship turns out.

“Head – Hoard” (University of Chicago Press) by Atsuro Riley. Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, juror Julie Carr had this to say about Riley’s new book – “A landscape charged with the bright light of discernment, where emotions are stirred by rhythmic torsion and sonic density.”

 “Amira’s Picture Day” (Holiday House) by Reem Faruqi and illustrated by Fahmida Azim. A joyful and sensitive look at the Muslim holiday of Eid as seen through the eyes of a young girl who loves to celebrate but feels conflicted because her school class photo shoot happens the same day.

“Colorful” (Counterpoint) by Eto Mori. Translated from the Japanese by Jocelyne Allen. This popular novel in Japan finally finds its way to the U.S. in this English translation.  A young adult tale of death, mental health and what it means to truly live. When a formless soul is given a second chance to return to earth and inhabit the body of a fourteen-year-old boy who has just committed suicide, things get complicated.

Now it’s becoming more common for foreign players to break into U.S. professional baseball but “MASHI – The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams Of Masunori Murakami, The First Japanese Major Leaguer” (Nebraska) by Robert K. Fitts takes us back to 1964 and tells the story of Japan’s first major leaguer in America. A baseball pioneer’s tale.

“The Alpactory – Ready, Pack, Go!” (Harper) written and illustrated (charmingly, I might add) by Ruth Chan. Most kids when embarking on a trip have trouble deciding what and how to pack. Let an alpaca with unusual packing skills be your guide as you contemplate your next journey. 

“In The Watchful City” (Tor Dot Com)  by S. Qiouyi Lu. Anima is an extrasensory human with the task of surveilling and protecting the city. But what happens when a mysterious outsider enters this world with curiosities from around the world? A multifaceted story  of borders, power, diaspora and transformation.

“City of Illusion” (Viking Graphic) is the graphic novel follow-up to Victoria Ying’s “City of Secrets”. In this sequel our child heroes Hannah and Ever live with the Morgan family in peace until Mr. Morgan is kidnapped. The kids get in a spat with street magicians but the two must learn to work together if the mystery of the missing is ever solved.

“Silent Parade – A Detective Galileo Novel” (Minotaur) by  Keigo Higashino. Detective Galileo, the author’s best-loved character from “The Devotion of Suspect X” returns in a complex and challenging mystery – several murders, decades apart, with no solid evidence. DCI Kusanagi turns once again to his college friend, Physics professor and occasional police consultant Manbu Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, to help solve the string of impossible to prove murders.

 “The Rice in the Pot Goes Round and Round” (Orchard) by Wendy Wan-Long Shang and illustrated by Lorian Tu.  A clever twist on “The Wheels on the Bus” in which  the eating of Chinese food is celebrated with love and laughter within a multi-generational family.

Ghost Food (One World) by Pik-Shuen Fung. A sparely written novel about a first generation of immigrants in Canada whose father decides to stay in Hong Kong earning him the title of “astronaut” father. With a lonely mother and ill father, a daughter struggles to understand her family history revealing threads of matrilineal history and the inheritance of stories and silences.

 “Intimacies” (Riverhead) by Katie Kitamura. An American woman newly relocated to The Hague works as an interpreter at a war crimes tribunal. Interpreting for a notorious former president accused of crimes against humanity, and entangled in a complicated love affair with a married man, she wrestles with mounting professional and personal dramas.

 “On The Ho Chi Minh Trail  –The Blood Road, The Women Who  Defended It, The Legacy”(ASIALINK, London) by Sherry Buchanan. Buchanan reveals the stories of the women who defended the Trail against the sustained American bombing campaign – the most ferocious in modern warfare – and of the artists who drew them. She focuses on what life was really like for the women and men under fire, bringing a unique perspective to the history of the Vietnam War.

“Not Here to Be Liked” (Katherine Tegen Books) by Michelle Quach. This young adult novel is about a high school girl Eliza Quan who sees herself as the perfect candidate to be editor of her school paper until an ex-jock white male candidate appears and threatens her ambitions. To thwart his challenge, she writes a viral essay inspiring a feminist movement. But what happens when she starts to like the guy?

“Anne’s Cradle – The Life & Works of Hanako Muraoka” (Nimbus) by Eri  Muraoka as translated by Cathy Hirano. Hanako Muraoka  is revered in Japan for her  translation of L. M Montgomery’s children’s classic, “Anne of Green Gables.” Because of her translation the book had a massive and enduring popularity in that country. This bestselling biography of Muraoka written by her granddaughter, traces the complex and captivating story of a woman who risked her freedom and devoted her life to bringing quality children’s literature to the people during a period of tumultuous change in Japan.

 “Second Sister” (Black Cat) by Chan Ho-Kei. When a schoolgirl commits suicide by leaping from the twenty-second floor, her older sister refuses to believe it. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game through the streets of Hong Kong as big sister hunts for the truth about the murder and the murderer.

 “Faraway Places” (Diode Editions) by Teow Lim Goh. The poems in this book reside in the spaces between the wild and the tamed, from orchid gardens and immense seas to caged birds and high alpine landscapes. It resists narrative and instead inhabits the residues of experience. It may be a private dictionary.

 “Jenny Mei Is Sad” (Little, Brown and Company) written and illustrated by Tracey Subisak. This book introduces young readers to the complexity of sadness and shows them that the best way to be a good friend – especially to someone sad – is by being there for the fun, the not-fun, and everything in between. Charmingly illustrated.

“Vessel – A Memoir” (HarperVia) by Cai Chongda. This tender collection of personal essays by the Editorial Director of GQ China spotlights the family, friends and neighbors of his small town who helped shape him as he struggled to understand himself and what the future might bring as a young boy from simple means.

 “A Way of Looking” (Silver Fish Review Press) by Jianqing Zheng. Half prose, half verse, this book is a heartfelt account of exile and homecoming. Uprooted from Chinese soil after the Cultural Revolution, this immigrant found new roots in the rich dark soil of the Mississippi delta and the home of the blues. Winner of the 2019  Gerald Cable Book Award.

 “Singing Emptiness – Kumar Gandharva Performs The Poetry Of Kabir” (Seagull) by Linda Hess. In this book, two men, five centuries apart, make contact with each other through poetry, music and performance. A great twentieth-century Hindustani classical vocalist takes up the challenge of singing the songs of Kabir, the great fifteenth century poet.

“Boys I Know” (Peachtree Teen Books) by Anna Gracia. A high school senior navigates messy boys and messier relationships in this bitingly funny and much-needed look into the overlap of Asian American identity and teen sexuality. June Chu is leaving high school to face an unknown world, battling her mother’s expectations and the drama of relationships and unsure on how she should work her path through it all.

“Glyph – graphic poetry + trans.  sensory” (Tupelo) by Naoko Fujimoto. The poet finds a new way to connect word and image. Inspired by Emaki (Japanese picture scroll). The poet/artist uses bright colors and designs to bring the words of each poem to the reader in novel ways and  from different directions. Or as Gabrielle Bates states, “I was wondering around the house of poetry and this book showed me to a door I didn’t know existed.”

“Lurkers” (Soho) by Sandi Tan. The author peoples her corner of surburban Los Angeles with two Korean American sisters rocked by suicide and a cast of characters like a creepy drama teacher, a gay horror novelist and a white hippie mom and her adopted Vietnamese daughter. Add drama and stir with a deft pen for optimum results.

“The Many Meanings of Meilan” (Kokila) by Andrea Wang. Meilan’s world is made up of a few key ingredients: her family’s beloved matriarch, the bakery the family owns and a run in Boston’s Chinatown; and her favorite Chinese fairy tales. But things change after her grandmother dies putting the family on the road in search of home. This young adult novel is an exploration of all the things it’s possible to grieve, the injustices large and small that make us rage, and the peace that’s unlocked when we learn to find home within ourselves.

A God at the Door” (Copper Canyon) by Tishani Doshi. Doshi is an award-winning writer and dancer of Welsh-Gujarati descent. She has published seven books of fiction and poetry. This new volume of poems calls on the extraordinary minutiae of nature and humanity to redefine belonging and unveil injustice.

“Finding My Voice” (Soho) is a reprint of a classic young adult novel by Marie Myong-Ok Lee. It is a timeless coming-of-age story of a Korean American teenage girl who attends an all-white high school in Minnesota. She struggles to fit in while being different. When she falls for a popular white football player. Can this relationship withstand the bigotry of a small town and her family’s disapproval?

 “Tokyo Ever After”(Flatiron) by Emiko Jean. It’s hard growing up Japanese American in a small, mostly-white Northern California town with a single mom. But when Izumi or “Izzy” as she’s known discovers her missing dad is the crown prince of Japan, things become surreal. Traveling to Japan to find her dad, her life is turned upside down. Not American enough in the States, not Japanese enough in Japan. Will Izumi ever land on her feet?

“The Bombay Prince” (Soho) by Sujata Massey. This popular mystery writer’s latest book is a Perveen Mistry series volume. Bombay’s fist female lawyer tries to bring justice to the family of a murdered female Parsi student just as the city streets erupt into riots protesting British rule. Set in 1920s Bombay.

“Angel & Hannah – A Novel in Verse”  (One World) by Ishle Yi Park.The electricity of first love in the heart  of New York’s neighborhoods.  When a Korean American girl from Queens meets a Puerto Rican American boy from Brooklyn at a quincecanera, sparks fly and so does family opposition and cultural complexity. This former poet laureate of Queens uses bursts of language and imagery in sonnet and song form to bring alive the glow of first love.

“Swimming Back To Trout River” (Simon & Schuster) by Linda Rui Feng. It’s 1986 and a ten-year-old girl lives in a small Chinese village with her grandparents. Her parents left for the opportunities in America years ago. Now her father promises to pick her up and take her to America by her 12th birthday. The little girl is determined to stay. And what she doesn’t know is that her parents are estranged, burdened by demons from their past. Can one family, with an ocean between them, start anew without losing themselves –or each other? Jean Kwok calls this novel, “A beautifully written, poignant exploration of family, art, culture, immigration, and most of all, love.”

 “Body Facts” (Diode Editions) by Jody Kim. These poems tell the story of a voice that is Korean, American, woman and body. It weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, the speaker’s childhood and family stories, US foreign policy with North Korea, and the things we do and shouldn’t do to our bodies.

“Made In Korea” (Simon & Schuster) by Sarah Suk. A “rom-com” novel debut depicts two entrepreneurial teens who butt heads – and maybe fall in love- while running competing Korean beauty businesses at their high school.

“At The End Of The Matinee” (Amazon Crossing) by Keiichiro Hirano as translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. Billed as a love story and psychological thriller, this novel traces the years long relationship between a concert guitarist and a journalist and examines whether the relationship will endure and perhaps blossom into something deeper.

 “Finding Junie Kim” (Harper) by Ellen Oh. A young adult novel about a Korean American girl who tries to fit in at school by not sticking out. But when racist graffiti appears at her middle school, she must make a decision. When a teacher assigns an oral history project, Junie decides to interview her grandparents about the Korean war and her world changes.

“A Pho Love Story” (Simon & Schuster) by Loan Le is a romantic YA rom-com in which two Vietnamese American teens must navigate their new  found love amid their family’s age-old feud about their competing pho restaurants.

“If I Were A Tree” (Lee & Low)  by Andrea Zimmerman as imaginatively illustrated by local artist Jin Jing Tsong. This picture book traces two siblings journey into the woods and how they use the five senses to explore the natural world. Tsong’s kaleidoscopic art makes the wooded world come to life and illuminates the author’s poetic ode to trees.

 “Death Fugue” (Restless) by Sheng Keyi as translated by Shelly Bryant. This novel is a dystopian allegory of the Tiananmen Square massacre and banned in China. 

“When Father Comes Home” (Orchard) is written and illustrated by Sarah Jung. June’s father is like a goose: he flies away for long periods of time so when he comes home, it’s a special occasion. This picture book turns the story of migrant fathers who work abroad in hopes of widening the field of opportunity for their children into a heart-warming, reflective tale.

“The Intimacies of Conflict – Cultural Memory and The Korean War” (NYU) by Daniel Y. Kim. The author delves into novels, films and photos to reconstruct memories of war and what it means to Koreans, Asian Americans and people of color

“The Tangle Root Palace” (Tachyon) by Marjorie Liu (“Monstress”} is her debut collection of dark, lush and spellbinding fantasy fiction. It’s full of thorny tales of love, revenge and new beginnings.

 “Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, And Identity” (Penguin Random House) by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi. Two 17 year old girls (a Chinese American and an Indian American) take a year off after high school and travel the country asking Americans how race has impacted their lives. Out of 500 stories, they edited it down to 115 for this anthology.

Inspired by the Peabody Award-winning podcast, “The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel” (Walker) by Sheila Chari is a young adult thriller. As kids are disappearing one by one from a middle school and their parents don’t seem to care, Mars Patel and his crew go on a desperate search for answers.

“Mapping Abundance  For a Planetary Future- Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i” (Duke) by Candance Fujikane. Fujikane criticizes settler colonial cartographies that diminish life and instead highlights the all encompassing voices of Hawaiian communities and their perspective of abundant healing and protection for the land.

 “I Am A Bird” (Candlewick) by Hope Lim as illustrated by Hyewon Yum. When a little girl goes on her morning bike ride with her dad, she imitates the sounds of birds. But when she sees a strange woman with a stern demeanor and a mysterious bag, she becomes frightened. A children’s book that encourages readers to embrace over similarities rather then letting our differences divide us.

“Planet Omar Incredible Rescue Mission” (Putnam) by Zanib Mian as illustrated by Nasaya Mafaridik. Omar is excited about his first trip to Pakistan but then tragedy strikes. His favorite teacher goes missing. Could his teacher been abducted by aliens? Omar investigates. Will creative thinking and a galactic spirit of adventure help solve this young adult mystery?

 “Much Ado About Baseball” (Yellow Jacket/Little Bee) by Rajani LaRocca. When Trish finds herself on the same summer baseball team as Ben, her math competition rival, two people must set aside their animosity and join together to help their team win. Will solving a math puzzle help the team succeed? Trish and Ben think so.

 “The Unicorn Rescue Society – The Secret of the Himalayas (Dutton) by Adam Gidwitz & Hena Khan is a continuation of the New york Times bestselling young adult series about the juvenile members of this group who travel to the rugged mountains of Pakistan to rescue a unicorn.

 “The Elephant Doctor of India” (Chicago Review Press) by Janie Chodosh. When a young elephant touching a sagging electric line in Assam, India gets stuck in the mud, there  is only one person to call – Dr. Sarma, the elephant doctor. Chodosh spends time with the doctor and reveals to young readers what this unique veterinarian does for the elephants he encounters.

 “Kudo Kids – The Mystery in Manhattan” (Razorbill) by Maia and Alex Shibutani. This brother & sister Olympic ice skating pair have turned their hands at writing young adult novels. The Kudo Kids come to New York to see the sights but when a dress from their fashion designer auntie’s collection goes missing, they end up in a chase around the city to nab the culprit.

“From Little Tokyo With Love” (Viking) by Sarah Kuhn. Rika is an adopted bi-racial girl with formidable judo skills and a fiery temper. When she hears rumors in her neighborhood that her real mother is not only alive but a Hollywood movie star, she goes on a quest to find her. Accompanied by actor friend Hank, she must make some big decisions that could change the direction in her own life.

“Dial A for Aunties” (Berkley) by Jesse Q. Sutanto. In this rom-com/murder mystery mash-up of mistaken identity and sisterhood, a wedding photographer enlists the aid of her mother and her sisters in hiding the dead body of her blind date while attempting to pull off an opulent wedding for a billionaire client.

 “Renegade Flight” (Razorbill) by Andrea Tang. In this YA fantasy adventure, a young pilot-in-training is grounded when found cheating on an entrance exam. Eager to re-join, she competes in a combat tournament to regain entry only to find she must battle a strangely attractive nemesis.

“Daddy’s Love For Me” (Mascot) by Sarah and JoAnn Jung as illustrated by Chiara Civati. A daughter feels resentment towards her overworked dad when he has no time to spend with her and show his love. When she overhears a conversation between her parents, she realizes how wrong she was.

“Counting Down With You” (Inkyard) by Tashie Bhuiyan. A reserved Bangladeshi teenage girl looks forward to a restful break when her demanding parents go abroad. Instead, she is roped into tutoring the school’s resident bad boy and then talked into a fake-dating façade. But then her life changes as the days go by and the two get to know each other.

 “Nina Soni, Sister Fixer” (Peachtree)  by Kashmira Sheth as illustrated by Jenn Kocsmiersky. This continuing series on the adventures of a young Indian American girl who looks for a new project while at the same time getting aggravated by her little sister’s behavior. Maybe there is a way to solve both issues at the same time?

 “Fatima’s Great Outdoors” (Kokila) by Ambreen Tariq as illustrated by Stevie Lewis. This picture book is a celebration of an immigrant family’s first outdoor camping trip and how it brings them all together for once inside one big tent under a canopy of stars.

 “Queen of Ice” (Duckbill) by Devika Rangachari. This young adult historic novel delves into the turbulent history of tenth-century Kashmir and Didda, princess of Lohara who learns how to hold her own in a court ridden with factions and conspiracies.

 “Foreign Bodies” (Norton) by Kimiko Hahn. Inspired by her encounter with the Jackson Collection of ingested curiosities at the Mutter Museum, this poet investigates the grip that seemingly insignificant objects have on our lives.

“Black Water Sister” (ACE) by Zen Cho. A modern fantasy  tale of ghosts, gods and the eternal bonds of family ties in the setting of modern-day Malaysia. A young woman returns to Penang and reunites with her extended family while at the sa

 “Leave Society” (Vintage) is Tao Lin’s first work of fiction since 2013. It follows a thirty-year-old novelist living part-time with his parents in Taiwan and part-time in New York who grows increasingly alienated from friends and community back in the U.S. As he rotates between places, the novel chronicles his growth as son, writer and misfit. 

“The Henna Wars” (Page Street Kids) by Adiba Jaigirdar. This romcom about two teen girls with rival henna businesses who find despite their competition, they have to come to terms with a realization of the affection they have for each other.

“In the Watchful City” (TorDotCom) by S. Qiouy Lu. An unforgettable futuristic tale in a secondary world that feels familiar in essence, and that centers trans, nonbinary, queer, mentally ill and Chinese-coded identities. It asks the eternal question, “What good is a city if it can’t protect its people?”

“Clues to the Universe” (Quill Tree) is the Young Adult debut novel by Chrsitina Li. What do an aspiring young rocket scientist reeling from her father’s death and an artistic boy who loves superheroes and comic books have in common? When the two become science class partners, they embark on an adventure and discover themselves while banding together to confront bullying, grief and their own differences.

 “Love Without A Storm” (Blood Axe Books) by Arundhathi Subramaniam is filled with poems that celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence.

“Heiress Apparently” (Abrams) by Diana Ma is the first book in an epic, romantic young adult series following the fictionalized descendants of the only officially recognized regent of China. When a young Chinese American woman from Illinois embarks on an acting career in Los Angeles having abandoned plans for college – things turn strange. When she gets a role in “M. Butterfly” shooting in Beijing, she uncovers a royal Chinese legacy in her family her parents would rather she never knew.

“Catcalling” (Open Letter) is a book of poems by Lee Soho. This poet is part of the new wave of innovative feminist and queer poetry appearing in South Korea today.

 “Terminal Boredom – Stories” (Verso) by Izumi Suzuki. This book of short stories introduces readers to a cult figure in Japanese literature who takes a unique slant on science fiction and concerns about technology, gender and imperialism.

“Forty Two Greens – Poems of Chonggi Mah” (Forsythia) as translated by Youngshil Cho. Winner of the Korean Literary Award, this poet’s search for the infinite in nature illuminates moments of beauty in the subconscious.

 “Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing” (LACMA/Prestel) by Stephen Little and Virginia Moon is the exhibition catalog for a major show that illuminates the restrained beauty strength and flexibility of Korean calligraphy. It is the first exhibition held outside Asia to focus on the history of writing and calligraphy in Korea.

“A Sky Beyond The Storm” (Razorbill) is the finale to the popular “Ember in the Ashes” series by Sabaa Tahir. This fantasy series finds the soul catcher must look beyond the borders of his land and take on a mission that could save or destroy – all that he holds dear.

“The Surprising Power of a Dumpling” (Scholastic) by Wai Chin. A teenage girl balances looking after her siblings, working in her dad’s restaurant and taking care of a mother suffering from a debilitating mental illness. A deep true-to-life  exploration through the complex crevices of culture, mental illness and family.

 “The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World” (Overlook) by Laura Imai Messina. A Japanese woman loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami. When she hears of a phone booth where people come to speak to departed loved ones, she makes a pilgrimage there only to find her grief won’t allow her to pick up the phone. A novel based on a true story.

 “Ten – A Soccer Story” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Shamini Flint. A good half-Indian girl in  1980’s Malaysia isn’t supposed to play a “boys” sport but Maya is all game as she achieves her goals while placating a bossy Indian grandmother and holding together a mixed race family on the verge of drifting apart. A young adult novel  that will inspire.

 “The Secret Talker” (HarperVia), a novel by Geling Yan as translated by Jeremy Tiang. Hongmei and Glen seem to have the perfect idyll life in the Bay Area even though their marriage is falling apart. When a secret admirer contacts Hongwei on the internet, his flirting turns into an obsession. 

“The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa” (Modern Library) won the Pen Award for “Poetry in Translation” for translator/poet Sawako Nakayasu. Now it’s brought back in print in the new Modern Library Torchbearers Series that highlights women who wrote on their own terms, with  boldness,  creativity and a spirit of resistance. Sagawa was a turn-of-the-century daringly experimental voice in Tokyo’s avant-garde poetry scene. Her life was cut short by cancer at the age of 24 but the words she left behind linger on.

“CURB” (Nightboat) is a new collection of poems by Divya Victor. This book documents how immigrants and Americans both, navigate the liminal sites of everyday living, ripped by violence and paved over with possibilities of belonging.

 “Séance Tea Party” (RH Graphic) by Reimena Yee. A lonely girl meets a ghost who haunts her home and finds a new friend. But what happens as the girl grows older and the ghost stays the same age?

 “Nina Soni, Master of The Garden” (Peachtree) by Kashmira Sheth and illustrated by Jenn Kocsmiersky. This young adult series about an Indian American fourth grader finds her working on a   garden project with her siblings supervised by their landscape architect mom. What they hadn’t counted on was the unpredictability of mother nature. Can Nina Soni help this garden survive?

Mindy Kim, Class President” (Aladdin) by Lyla Lee is part of a series of books on the adventures of a teenage Korean American girl. In this story, she decides to run for class president but first she must overcome her fear of public speaking.

“The Truffle Eye” (Zephyr) by Vann Nguyen is the debut collection of poems by this Vietnamese-Israeli poet as translated by Adriana X. Jacobs. In it she tackles questions of identity and cultural legacy from points of emotion and shock.

“Flowering Tales – Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan” (Columbia University Press) by Takeshi Watanabe. This is the first extensive study of this historical Japanese tale. It unravels 150 years of happenings in Heian era society penned by female writers.

“Pippa Park Raises Her Game” (Fabled Films Press) by Erin Yun. This loose reimaging of “Great Expectations” follows a young Korean American girl learning to navigate her new life at an elite private school in this young adult novel.

 “Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From” (Wave) is a new book by Sawako Nakayasu, an artist working with language, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She, alone is responsible for introducing a wide variety of modern Japanese poets  to English readers throughout the years with her fresh and skillful translations. This new volume is a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.

 “A Taste for Love” (Razorbill) by Jennifer Yen. When a rebellious teenage girl agrees to help her mom’s bakery stage a junior competition, she soon realizes it’s a setup. All of the contestants are young Asian American men her mom has handpicked for her to date. What can she do?

“That Was Now, This Is Then” (Greywolf Press) is the first new collection from Paris Review Editor Vijay Seshadri since his 2014 Pulitzer Prizewinning book, “3 Sections.” Rosanna Warren says of this new book, “These are poems of lacerating self-awareness and stoic compassion. It is a book we need, right now.”

“Midsummer’s Mayhem” (Yellow Jacket) by Rajani LaRocca. When her dad , a renowed food writer loses his sense of taste, it puts a damper on this eleven-year old girl’s dream of becoming a baker and winning a cooking contest. When she meets a boy in the forest, he teaches her about new natural ingredients. Will the everyday magic of baking give her the courage she needs to save her father?

“Every Reason We Shouldn’t” (Tor Teen) by Sara Fujimura. When a teenage girl’s Olympic figure skater dreams fade, she meets a young man at her family’s rink who’s driven to get to the Olympics in speed skating. As a rivalry develops, so does a romance.

“My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree” (Greywolf) by Yi Lei and translated from the Chinese by Changtai Bi and Tracy K. Smith. Yiyun Li says of this book, “Yi Lei, one of China’s most original and independent poets, documents not only Chinese history in the past four decades, but also more importantly a woman’s private history of rebellion and residence.”

“Disappear Doppelganger Disappear” (Little A) is by the author of “The Hundred-Year Flood”, Matthew Salesses. Laura Van den Berg writes “How to live in a world that refuses to see you? Matt Kim’s intoxicating battle with his mysterious doppelganger moves him deeper and deeper into the vast and urgent sea of this question – and towards a possible answer. Inventive and profound, mordantly hilarious and wildly moving.”

“The Boys in the Back Row” (Levine Querido) by Mike Jung. When band geeks, comic nerds and best friends Eric and Matt tire of being bullied by racist comments and being called “gay”, they hatch a plan to meet a famous comic book artist during regional marching competition but an enemy has other ideas.

“The Girl Who Stole an Elephant” (Peachtree)  by Nizrana Farook. Deep adventures in the Sri Lankan jungle await young readers as a nobleman’s rebellious daughter steals the queen’s jewelry and makes her escape on the king’s elephant. How will things turn out in the end?

“Pink Mountain on Locust Island” (Coffee House) by Jamie Marina Lau. In her debut novel, shortlisted for Australia’s prestigious Stella Prize, old hazy vignettes conjure a multi-faceted world of philosophical angst and lackadaisical violence. A teenage girl drifts through a monotonous existence in a Chinatown apartment until her dad and boyfriend plot a dubious enterprise that requires her involvement.

“Kimono Culture – The Beauty of Chiso” (Worchester Art Museum) by Vivian Li and Christine D. Starkman tells the story of a Kyoto-based designer that is one of the oldest and most prestigious kimono makers in Japan today.

 “Everything I Thought I Knew” (Candlewick) by Shannon Takaoka. A teenage girl wonders if she’s inherited more than just a heart from her donor when odd things begin to happen. As she searches for answers, what she learns will lead her to question everything she assumed she knew.

 “Goat Days” (Seagull Books) by Benyamin as translated by Joseph Koyippally. A poor young man in Southern India dreams of getting a job in a Persian Gulf country so he can earn enough money to send to his family back home. When his wish becomes reality, things don’t turn out as planned and he is locked into a slave-like existence herding goats in the desert. Circumstances force him to conceive of a hazardous scheme  to escape his life of loneliness and alienation. But will it be enough?

“Last Tang Standing” (Putnam) by Lauren Ho. “Crazy Rich Asians” meets “Bridget Jones” in this funny debut novel about the pursuit of happiness, surviving one’s thirties intact and opening one’s self up to love.

“AN I NOVEL” (Columbia) by Minae Mizumura as translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter. This novel focuses on a single day of a Japanese expatriate in America as she reflects on her life in this country and why she wants to return to Japan to become a writer and write again in Japanese.

“Sacrificial Metal” (Conduit Books & Ephemera) by Esther Lee. It won the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize. Sean Dorsey writes that the book “dances with astute curiosity and deep tenderness across the shifting grounds of grief, touch, bearing witness, memory, and our obstinate human instinct for future planning. With great compassion, Lee’s poems remind us that everything human eventually unravels…”

 “Forbidden Memory – Tibet During the Cultural Revolution” (Potomac)  by Tsering Dorje. Edited by Robert Barnett and translated by Susan T. Chen. The author uses eyewitness accounts with expert analysis to tell the story of how Tibet was shaken by foreign invasion and cultural obliteration. This book is a long-overdue reckoning of China’s role in Tibet’s tragic past.

 “Paper Bells” (The Song Cave) by Phan Nhien Hao and translated by Hai-Dang Phan is a new volume of poems by a poet shaped by the Vietnam War, forced to re-start a life as a teenager in the U.S. His poems bear witness to a delicate balance between two countries and cultures.

 “So This Is Love: a Twisted Tale” (Disney) by Elizabeth Lim. A young adult re-telling of the Cinderella story. In this one, Cinderella leaves the house where she works and gets a job as the palace seamstress. Here she becomes witness to a grand conspiracy to overthrow the king. Can she find a way to save the kingdom?

“From Maybe To Forever – An Adoption Story” (Creston) by M. L. Gold and N. V. Fong as illustrated by Jess Hong. Told from a big sister’s point of view, this picture book makes the complicated adoption process clear for the youngest readers and the colorful art show

 “Butterfly Sleep” (Tupelo) by Kim Kyung Ju as translated by Jake Levine is a historical drama based in the early Joson Dynasty. With a mixture of magic realism and dark humor, he tells an existentialist allegory of Korean’s rapid development. This play is a modern fable of a rapidly changing country that must confront its ghosts.

“Lion Boys and Fan Girls” (Epigram) by Pauline Loh looks at teenage boys who make a pledge to ban dating and focus on lion dancing. But they must contend with unusual girls and cyberbullying. The rich culture of Singapore and the fascinating history of lion dance make this a compelling young adult read.

Set in a New England town where accusations led to the Salem witch trials, Quan Berry’s novel “We Ride Upon Sticks” (Pantheon) looks at a 1980’s girls field hockey team who flaunt society’s notions of femininity in order to find their true selves and lasting friendship.

“People From My Neighborhood – Stories” (Soft Skull) by Hiromi Kawakami and translated by Ted Goossen. From the author of the internationally bestselling “Strange Weather in Tokyo”, this new book is a collection of interlinking stories that masterfully blend the mundane and the mythical. In these people’s lives, details of the local and everyday slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions and visitations from ghosts and gods. Here is a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.

“A Bond Undone” (St. Martin’s Griffin) by Jin Yong is the second volume of “Legends of The Condor Heroes”, one of Asia’s most popular martial arts novels. Translated by Gigi Chang.

 “Taiwan In Dynamic Transition – Nation Building And Democratization” (UW)  edited by Ryan Dunch and Ashley Esarey. This book provides an up-to-date assessment of contemporary Taiwan highlighting that country’s emergent nationhood and its significance for world politics.

 “The Journey of Liu Xiabao – From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate” (Potomac) edited by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman with Yu Zhang, Jie Li and Tienchi Martin-Liao. Liu Xiabao was more than a dissident poet and this collection of essays capture the intellectual and activist spirit of this late literary critic and democracy icon.

“Harris Bin Potter And The  Stoned Philosopher” (Epigram) by Suffian Hakim. This young Singapore-based writer’s parody of Harry Potter bases the story in Malaysia and seasons it with local and pop cultural references.

“Mindy Kim and the Lunar New Year Parade” (Aladdin) by Lyla Lee and illustrated by Dung Ho. Mindy is excited to go to the annual lunar new year parade but things don’t go as planned. Can she still find a way to celebrate?

 “From Maybe To Forever – An Adoption Story” (Creston) by M.L. Gold and N.V. Fong and illustrated by Jess Hong. Told from the view of an eager older sister, this is an endearing story about adoption from an often-neglected point of view.

News & Information

It is with a deep sadness that we note the passing of Dr. Franklin Odo, noted pioneer researcher, historian, advocate for Asian American Studies,  educator and founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center who passed away in late September. His accomplishments spread across so many arenas in the field of Asian American Studies and beyond. He was our renaissance man. I still have fond memories of how supportive and kind he and his wife Enid were when we performed for the first time as the Buddha Bandits (myself and fellow poets Lawson Inada and Garrett Hongo) with local musicians at Cal State Long Beach. An event brought about through the efforts of the late Duane Ebata. Odo was part of the movement that spearheaded the establishment of ethnic studies in colleges and universities in the late 60s and 70s. He co-edited the seminal early anthology “Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971) with Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong and Buck Wong. A publication that many people feel was an early bible for the Asian American movement. Other important publications followed – He co-authored “A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawai’i, 1885 – 1924” (1985) done with Kazuko Sinoto, authored “No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai’i During World War II” (2003); edited “The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience” (2003); and authored “Voices From the Canefields: Folk Songs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai’i” (2013). He once said: “If you don’t control your own culture, and your own vision of life, and your own participation in life, then you don’t control anything. And that’s what we’re about. The true spirit of any kind of democracy is to have people be autonomous at the same time that they know they’re dependent on the community around them.” His last teaching post was at Amherst College. His family suggests donating to a fund in his honor at the University of Hawai’i: https://giving.uhfoundation.org/funds/13014604. For all Asian Americans, Franklin Odo should we viewed as what the Japanese call “a designated cultural treasure.”

Artist Trust Fellowships are merit-based awards of $10,000 for practicing artists of exceptional talent/ability that reside in Washington state. Applications are open on October 3, 2022 and close on November 7, 2022 at 11:59pm (PST). Go to [email protected] for details.

The Asian American Foundation has partnered with Sundance Institute to launch a new scholarship for AAPI artists. This “Collab Scholarship” will provide technical and creative support. This year’s recipients include Vera Brunner-Sung, Desdemona Chiang, Shayok Misha Choudhury, Tadashi Nakamura, Neo Sora and Sean Wang. In addition, The Asian American Foundation announced this year’s scholarship recipients which included Georgia Fu, Leomax He, Jenna Lam, Simi Prasad, Norbert Shieh and Nicole Solis-Sison.

Centrum has announced the 2022 Emerging Artist and Writer residents for residencies at Centrum, a residency program for creative artists in Port Townsend. This year marks the first Emerging Writers component to the annual Emerging Artist Residency. All residents will receive a month of lodging and stipends for October 2022. Among the ten selected are Frank Abe, Josephine Lee and Satpreet Kahlon. Congratulations to them all and may their stay there reap creative rewards that we all can enjoy. For more details, go to centrum.org.

For opera fans, Operavision is a free opera streaming service. Go to the link https://operavision.e/ for details.

The Seattle Public Library offers free tickets to visit Puget Sound museums. Visit www.spl.org/museumpass for details. Also available for loans is the Discover Pass which provides access to more than 100 state parks and other recreational amenities. Go to www.spl.org/outdoorrecreation.

“Advancing Justice” – Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) held their annual American Courage Awards event in October 2022. Woori show and Sesame Street puppeteer Kathleen Kim was honored with the Changemaker Award, U.S. Senator Mazie Hirono received the 2022 American Courage Award. Outgoing Board of Directors’ Chair Parkin Lee received the President’s Award. The event was streamed live at americancourageawards.org. The AAJC’s mission is to advance the civil and human rights of Asian Americans and to build and promote  fair and equitable society for all.  Their website is advancing justice-aajc.org.

The University of Washington Press issues a call for writers working on a manuscript or new book proposal. The editors at this local press want to connect with current and prospective authors about new projects and book proposals. They invite writers to contact them by email to set up a meeting by phone or zoom. If interested, contact Executive Editor Lorri Hagman at [email protected].

Applications are open for The Jack Straw Artist Residency Programs.  Artist Support and New Media Gallery Program deadline is Monday, November 28. 2022. Questions? – go to [email protected] or call 206-634-0919.

Every year, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative Americans with what is known for short as “Genius Awards.” Congratulations to this year’s Asian American who nabbed this prestigious award. Winners include the following – Artist Paul Chan, computer scientist Yejin Choi, mathematician June Huh, historian Monica Kim, health justice lawyer Priti Krishtel, electronic music composer/performer Ikue Mori, and primary care physician & researcher Emily Wong.

Poets & Writers has a “Readings & Workshops Program” that provides mini-grants that pay writers to give readings or conduct workshops in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, Seattle, Tucson and Washington D.C. For details, try [email protected].

AARP announces a Creative Writing & Short Film Competition hosted by The Chinese American Museum, D.C. The theme is “Our America:Generation to Generation”. Go to https://www.chineseamericanmuseum.org/generations for more details.

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