“Kawika Guillermo (they/he) is an award-winning author and third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas.” Guillermo notes in his website that he has lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and currently resides in Vancouver, Canada, where they work as an Associate Professor of Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name of this creator used for their literary works. Their academic writings are issued under the name Christopher B. Patterson. Patterson earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington.
Fiction
All Flowers Bloom
Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In a cruise ship stateroom, a soul awakens in the afterlife, still dressed in the Roman servant garbs of his previous life.
He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.
Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.
Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.
In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.
For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.
Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
Awards and Honours
2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel
Fiction
Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel
Washington, DC: Westphalia Press, 2018.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Exasperated by the small-minded tyranny of his hometown, Skyler Faralan travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: Sophea, a short-fused NGO worker; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, a defiant intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place.
Awards and Honours
2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Prose (Winner)
2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest–Literary Category (Finalist)
Mixed Form (Poetry & Prose; Memoir)
Nimrods: A Fake-Punk Self-Hurt Anti-Memoir
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Charged with the “personal is political” mandate of feminist critique, Guillermo honestly and powerfully recounts his wayward path, from being raised by two preachers’ kids in a chaotic mixed-race family to his uncle’s death from HIV-related illness, which helped prompt his parents’ divorce and his mother’s move to Las Vegas, to his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms by immigrating to South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Canada. Through an often crass, cringey, and raw hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects on anger, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation—traits that do not simply vanish after one is cast into the treacherous role of fatherhood or the dreaded role of professor. Guillermo’s shameless mixtures of autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad dad jokes present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir.
Awards and Honours
2024 Lambda Literary Award–Bisexual Non-fiction (Finalist)
2024 American Book Fest Awards in the Poetry–General and Poetry: Narrative categories (Finalist)
Non-fiction (Essays & Memoir)
Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Of Floating Isles is a captivating collection of personal essays that unpack the mystifying and often intimate roles that video games play in our lives. Interweaving memoir with cultural critique, Kawika Guillermo explores the subtle yet transformative influences of video games in shaping them as a queer and mixed-race grandson of two preachers; as a traveller, immigrant, and games scholar; and as a father, caregiver, and mourner. Through a mixture of fanciful musing, rigorous inquiry, and unflinching self-reflection, Of Floating Isles reframes the gamer’s retreat from others not as social isolation, but as a quest for a different community, one where they feel seen, heard, and understood. This deep-seated longing to belong, Guillermo suggests, forms the imaginative worlds of video games and the floating isles they conjure.
By exploring their own lifelong attachment to video games, Guillermo shows how games can spark rage, confusion, and the desire to escape, but these emotions are not necessarily bad – they are the growing pains that many young people must work through. So too can games provide reflective realms to dwell, to imagine, and to build spaces for queer, trans, racialized, and neurodiverse groups. Envisioning games as forms of poetic interaction, Of Floating Isles boldly conveys their truth-telling powers: their ability to offer guidance in times of loss and hardship, and their power to reveal the oppressive mechanisms of our “real” world.
Links
Kawika Guillermo personal website
Christopher B. Patterson faculty page at the University of British Columbia
Publisher Arsenal Pulp Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Publisher Westphalia Press, an imprint of the Policy Studies Organization