Words@Mānoa Writers
AY 2025-6
Julian Aguon is a Chamorro human rights lawyer and the founder of Blue Ocean Law. He is also the author of No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies (Penguin Random House 2022), a collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power.
Donald Carreira Ching was born and raised in Kahaluʻu on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. His collection Blood Work and Other Stories was published by Bamboo Ridge Press in June 2025. , He earned his PhD from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and now teaches at Leeward Community College.
Cathy Linh Che is the daughter of Vietnam War refugees. A writer and multidisciplinary artist, her poetry collection Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025) was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award and her documentary We Were the Scenery screened at HIFF 2025, among other national film festivals.
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of two books of poetry: All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems (Persea Books 2025), which won the American Academy of Poets’ James Laughlin Award, and Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk Prize.
Anthony Cody is the author of The Rendering (Omnidawn 2023) and Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn 2020), winner of a 2022 Whiting Award and a 2021 American Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award.
Writer-in-Residence Spring 2026: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto currently serves as the Fiction Editor at No Tokens Journal and as Co-Chair of Kundiman’s Hawai’i regional group. Her debut, Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare: Stories (Bloomsbury 2023), was a USA Today National Bestseller and finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature.
AY 2024-5
Wo Chan is a poet and drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl. They are the author of the poetry collection Togetherness (2022), a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize. Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary.
Elissa Washuta is the author of three books of essays: My Body is a Book of Rules, Starvation Mode, and White Magic (Tin House 2021), which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Open Book Award, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, and named among the best books of 2021 by TIME, the New York Public Library, and NPR. She is an enrolled member of the Cowlitz tribe.
Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2017. In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, Solito (Hogarth 2022), Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert at age nine.
Jo Cipriano is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize and two University of Arizona MFA Creative Writing Awards. They are a poet and essayist working on their first book.
Writer-in-Residence Spring 2025: Franny Choi
Franny Choi was born in Minneapolis to Korean immigrants. A poet and essayist, Choi is the author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On and, with Terisa Siagatonu, Bao Phi, and No‘u Revilla, a co-editor of We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word.
AY 2023-4
Joe Balaz was born and raised in Hawai’i and is of Hawaiian, Slovakian, and Irish heritage. He writes in both American English and Pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English) and often composes concrete poetry with elements of visual art.
Francesca T. Royster is a Professor of English at DePaul University, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare Studies, Performance Studies, Critical Race theory, Gender and Queer Theory and African American Literature. She is the author of Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave/MacMillan in 2003) and Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Outrageous Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan, 2013).
Margo Steines is a native New Yorker, a journeyman ironworker, and serves as mom to a wildly spirited small person. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story, from W.W. Norton.
Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of a fiction collection, Sinking Bell: Stories, an NPR Best Book of 2022; a book of poetry, Currents, which received an American Book Award; and the nonfiction chapbook Troubleshooting Silence in Arizona.
Mai Der Vang is the author of two collections of poetry. Her most recent, Yellow Rain (Graywolf, 2021), received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and a Northern California Book Award. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Voelcker Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the California Book Awards.