Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, [1] Kaya Press is currently[ when? ] housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. [2]
The current editors of Kaya Press are Sunyoung Lee and Neelanjana Banerjee. The board of directors includes Jean Ho, Huy Hong, Adria Imada, Juliana S. Koo, Sunyoung Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chez Bryan Ong, and Patricia Wakida, and the editorial committee consists of Lisa Chen, Neelanjana Banerjee, Sunyoung Lee, Warren Liu, Gerald Maa, and Sesshu Foster.
Kaya Press publishes fiction, experimental poetry, critical essays, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, and the recovery of important and overlooked work (e.g. "lost novels") from the Pacific Rim and the API diaspora. Kaya identifies as "a group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas." [3] Kaya Press participated in a selection of literary events, such as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Literature Festival and the LA Times Festival of Books. [4]
"Kaya" refers to the tribal confederation of six Korean city-states that existed from the middle of the first until the sixth century CE that is remembered as a utopia of learning, music, and the arts due to its trade and communication with China, Japan, and India. This word has multiple meanings across different languages: in Sanskrit, "kaya" means "body"; in Japanese, "kaya" often refers to a type of yew tree that withstands harsh conditions; in Tagalog, it means "to be able"; and in Turkish it means "rock"; in Zulu, "kaya" means "home". Like its name, Kaya Press's publishing vision is to explore the multiple connections, chance or otherwise, between cultures. [3]
Kaya's logo evokes the smoking tiger featured in many Korean folk paintings. Kaya's tiger smokes a cigar in lieu of the traditional Asian pipe to connect the historical with the contemporary.
Kaya press and authors' awards include Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, [5] the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, [6] the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, [7] the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Award, [8] the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize, [9] and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award [10]
Kaya Press writers include:
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
José García Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the pen name Doveglion, based on the characters he derived from his own works. These animals were also explored by another poet, E. E. Cummings, in "Doveglion, Adventures in Value", a poem dedicated to Villa.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Bino A. Realuyo is a Filipino-American novelist, poet, community organizer and adult educator. He was born and raised in Manila, Philippines but spent most of his adult life in New York City. He is the author of a novel, The Umbrella Country, a poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, and the editor of two anthologies.
Cirilo F. Bautista was a Filipino poet, critic and writer of nonfiction. A National Artist of the Philippines award was conferred on him in 2014.
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is An Ordinary Life, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Waywiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Dr. Ravi Shankar is an American poet, editor, and former literature professor at Central Connecticut State University and City University of Hong Kong and Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT). He is the founding editor of online literary journal Drunken Boat. He has been called "a diaspora icon" by The Hindu and "one of America's finest younger poets" by former Connecticut poet laureate Dick Allen.
Sherwin Bitsui is a Navajo writer and poet. His book of poems, Flood Song (2009), won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.
Toi Derricotte is an American poet. She is the author of six poetry collections and a literary memoir. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. From 2012–2017, Derricotte served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a professor emerita in writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Derricotte is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
Willie Perdomo is a Puerto Rican writer. He is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award finalist, 1996), Postcards of El Barrio, and Smoking Lovely, which received a PEN Beyond Margins Award. His children's book, Visiting Langston, received the Coretta Scott King Honor. Winner of the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, the New York City Book Award (2019), and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, Perdomo was also the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 2001 and 2009. He is currently an Instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy and was appointed State Poet of New York, 2021-2023.
David Mura is an American author, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and performance artist whose writings explore the themes of race, identity and history. In 2018, Mura has published a book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing, in which he argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft.
Sesshu Foster is an American poet and novelist.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose (2014) was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines (2019) won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.
Walter K. Lew is a Korean-American poet and scholar. He has taught creative writing, East Asian literatures, and Asian American literature at Brown University, Cornell University, Mills College, the University of Miami, and UCLA. Aside from the award-winning Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts, Lew is the author, co-author, or editor of seven books and several special journal issues and artist's books. Lew's translations and scholarship on Korean literature and Asian American literature have been widely anthologized and he was the first U.S. artist to revive the art of movietelling, beginning in 1982.