Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes
Book of the Year
(About Hawai‘i)

Susanna Moore
Book of the Year
(Not About Hawai‘i)

Jessica Machado
Debut Author

Megan Kakimoto
Author Under 35

Welcome to the inaugural HONOLULU Book Awards. You may ask, rightly, what took us so long? There’s a reason this celebration of Hawai‘i writers and literature is happening now.

 

First, 2023 was a breakthrough year for Island writers. A crop of good books from local publishers is nothing new; the strength of our regional literature is in houses such as Bamboo Ridge, Bess Press, University of Hawai‘i Press, Mutual Publishing, Tinfish Press and Watermark Publishing. But our good fortune was compounded last year, when month after month, titles arrived from mainstream East Coast publishers, including HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Knopf Doubleday and Amazon’s Little A.

 

Hawai‘i has never had a year like this—not even close. Even better, the books in this group are all-in on the rich complexity of our culture and history. No mai tais under the moonlight, no White Lotus-like resorts where visitors act out Polynesian fantasies (although several of these books definitely critique those fantasies).

 

From its inception as Paradise of the Pacific, HONOLULU has always published short stories, poetry and creative nonfiction. In 1983, HONOLULU established the magazine’s short story contest, which instantly attracted submissions from across the country. This was still in the heyday of the magazine short story—when the likes of Kurt Vonnegut could command $10,000 for a story in Ladies’ Home Journal—and HONOLULU paid as much as $1,000 for first prizes. Even as late as 2010, when Starbucks co-sponsored the contest, there were five runners-up and 10 honorable mentions, many of them familiar today: Lisa Linn Kanae, Alexei Melnick, Christy Passion, Cedric Yamanaka.

 

We even made a book of our stories with Bamboo Ridge Press in 1999. And although the contest eventually ended, it was revived (appropriately enough at Halloween) with 2017’s ghost story contest. In 2018, HONOLULU published the piece, “50 Essential Hawai‘i Books” (and 37 Roll of Honor selections). Its success led to a follow-up 2022 roundup, “Essential Hawai‘i Books You Should Read: The Next 134.” Including our past summer reading issues and annual holiday lists, we’ve published some 300 book reviews in the past decade. We do this because books are our cultural repository, a reliable and survivable record of who we are.

 

For our awards for books published in 2023, as with our “essential books” lists, our criteria was simple. We selected winners based on their quality, impact and influence. We considered reviews and awards they may have accrued, as well as overall readability. Finally, we looked for the heightened appreciation that occurs in the presence of great writing.

 

So here they are, the inaugural winners of the HONOLULU Book Awards. Welcome to the dance.

After 2012’s Boi No Good, an epic tale of a Native Hawaiian family (and city of Honolulu) doomed by the original sin of dispossession, Chris McKinney jumped from social realist novels to filmmaking. “From 2013 to 2017,” he says, “I went full throttle trying to sell two television/streaming crime series set in contemporary Hawai‘i. I was flying to LA, meeting with agents, producers and actors.” Even after publishing a 2016 corrupt cop noir, Yakudoshi: Age of Calamity, and despite “the pathological optimism of Hollywood,” he discovered, “modern Hawai‘i is a near-impossible sell.”

 

Instead of contorting himself trying to give Hollywood what it wanted, which he says is “a notoriously crime-riddled setting … with murderous law enforcement and heaps of racial tension,” he started a sci-fi noir novel about Hawai‘i. “I imagined it about 120 years into the future, scarred and recolonized beyond recognition.”

 

The Water City trilogy is the result. “It was me attempting to tether myself to a future Hawai‘i, while dipping my toes into imagined places beyond, like a post-apocalyptic Midwest, an underwater Osaka, and the moon.” The plot pairs genetic engineering and environmental catastrophe with a scientist who’s fooled the world into thinking she’s our genius-savior. How? By using a telescope on Maunakea.

 

“Not only was it really fun to write,” McKinney says, “it was much easier to sell”—to New York indie Soho Press, which published Midnight, Water City in 2021. Eventide, Water City and Sunset, Water City followed in 2023; both received starred reviews, and the concluding volume was named a Best Speculative Fiction by CrimeReads. Two books plus McKinney’s prophetic vision of Hawai‘i’s future if we don’t get our act together equal a tour de force the likes of which we haven’t seen.

Begun as an act of self-preservation after squandering her 20s in a bar-centric life in Los Angeles, Local “started as a memoir about isolation,” Jessica Machado says, “mostly tied to my relationship to my mother,” a white Baptist from Louisiana whose impulsive marriage to a laid-back Hawaiian-Portuguese man ended even before he had a child by a more beachy haole girl. With her dad absent and her mother, a beloved public-school teacher in Wai‘anae, routinely coming home late and exhausted, Machado was raised by television.

 

School friendships, MTV and boy bands filled the void. In college, she started clubbing. But while floating through party-hearty LA years later, the decline of her parents and a couple of bad mistakes led to a realization: It’s not just her life that feels empty.

 

“The more I took space from the book, the more I realized my feelings of isolation were much deeper than any barriers between my mom and [me]; they were also about my disconnection to my Hawaiian ancestry and culture even though I grew up in Hawai‘i,” Machado says.

 

Finding a path back didn’t happen automatically. Local grips us with honest artistry, chronicling Machado’s despairing struggle to balance caregiving, forgiveness and caring for herself. A story of grit and grace, it hits hard.

 

And it’s touched hearts. “Most of the emails and DMs I receive are from other mixed-race people, many locals who grew up in Hawai‘i and moved away,” says Machado, now an NBC News editor and mother. “They too understand loving our home with such intensity, but never quite fitting in either here or on the continent. The ones that really get me, though, are the readers who tell me they too never felt Hawaiian enough. We have to remind ourselves that Hawaiian is not blood quantum or ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i fluency—it’s connecting with our ‘āina and community.”

It used to be a regular thing to hear of a writer escaping an office job with a breakthrough book—from Theodore Dreiser to Joseph Heller to Vonnegut to George Saunders—but since the mid-1970s, the MFA path has dominated, and some say deadened, American lit with groupthink (and soul-crushing teaching loads). So a good reason to appreciate Kamehameha grad Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the five years she put in working downtown before publishing Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare.

 

But the real reason is even better—with one collection of short stories, she put our local lit scene on notice. After finishing her preview galley before it even came out, a couple of local writers feverishly traded notes. Verdict: If books were an arcade game, we’d be in a full-on, red-light-flashing tilt.

 

Kakimoto writes tough, yet surreally expansive tales that often blast off right where a typical short story heads for a tidy epiphany (the way they teach in workshops). They’re set here, among working people and family, but they rip the skin off the sentimental pieties and communal fictions we use to bandage our wounds. And yet the book also works as a sophisticated self-critical text, calling out the author’s impulses to make art that will meet the approval of the MFA world’s academic overlords.

 

Who noticed? The literary establishment. Every Drop was a USA Today national bestseller after Kakimoto made the Publishers Weekly Writers to Watch list. The book also made the American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next List; received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist; and made best of 2023 lists for Book Riot, the Debutiful podcast, Electric Literature, Washington Independent Review of Books and Powell’s Books.

Craig Santos Perez started an MFA program intending to write about his homeland, Guåhan, or Guam, and his CHamoru culture. “At the end of the two years, I still had so many more stories to tell,” he says. “That is when I decided to create a multibook series in order to create an interconnected space for other poems that I wanted to write in the future.”

 

The first book in the series was published by Tinfish Press in 2008. Since then, four more books have followed, each titled from unincorporated territory followed by a colon and a single word in brackets: [åmot] is the latest.

 

In CHamoru, åmot means medicinal plant. And the poems do seem to go gathering/foraging throughout Guam’s once-war-shattered, still-colonized natural environment in search of new shoots and strong roots. As in the preceding volumes, the slight disorientation of the title dissolves when we embark on the poems, thin lines extended via ellipses to the margins, single words left floating, mirroring atolls of Micronesian archipelagos.

 

This typographic device conveys our Pacific distances and connective tissue. Just as Perez replaces Western poetic cartography, he substitutes Guåhan history and interiority for the recorded history as written by the colonizers and occupiers. Overall, his bold ambition and discipline in carrying it out, as well as the expansive lines, recall Walt Whitman’s ever-expanding universe in Leaves of Grass.

 

In November 2023, from unincorporated territory [åmot] was awarded the National Book Award in Poetry out of 295 entries submitted by publishers. The judges’ citation: “While tenderly elegizing family and homeland, Craig Santos Perez is also always aware of the forces—of colonialism, militarism, environmental destruction, and systemic sexual abuse—that devastate what is intimate and hallowed. Proudly polylingual, as lyrical as it is outraged, from unincorporated territory [åmot] is poetry as fierce medicine.”