COLORING THE CANON
Seeking to Increase Racial Diversity in the Anglosphere's Publishing Industry & Literature
Want to read more books by authors of color?
Find a few book recommendations here! Just click the hyperlinked title to support these authors and their publishers.
01 Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging by Tessa McWatt (Scribe UK, 2019)
A poetic memoir where Tessa uses her own body to investigate essential questions of identity and belonging, Shame on Me describes the feelings of confusion, guilt, and acceptance that those of multicultural and racial identities often feel but never speak about. It is a text that allows those who code-switch between backgrounds to finally engage with conversations they wrestle with every day and see stories like theirs given the space and legitimacy to exist in the written word. Part scientific investigation, history lesson, and inquiry into family myth, Tessa's personal vignettes stand out as the most honest and powerful voice of them all.
Image courtesy of Scribe UK.
02 Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber, 2019)
A beautiful debut collection of poetry, Mary Jean Chan's Flèche was a compelling read, start to finish. Born in Hong Kong, Chan's poems embrace her multilingual identity, while never translating the Cantonese for monolingual audiences. Fluidly moving from poems about multicultural identity, to queerness, to her relationship with her mother, Chan's mimics her childhood art of fencing with her words. The result: a biographical, eloquent poetic collection you will want to revisit again and again.
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"Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."
Never before have I felt my identity, my existence so represented in the opening pages of a text. Told in a series of essays that evoke, wonder, and critique, Minor Feelings recognizes the "model minority" of America, and how Asian-Americans both benefit from and are victims of systemic racism because of it. By pointing us to the violence behind Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's death and not hiding her own battle with depression, Cathy uniquely acknowledges the taboo topics of violence and mental health that Asian-American culture often silences. Though Cathy writes in academic English, her complicated relationships with Korean and English, and the cultures they represent, produce beautiful, quotable lines that earn Minor Feelings its place as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the time of the "Kung Flu" virus.
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04 will be skipped. Call me superstitious, but IYKYK!
05 回家 Letters Home by Jennifer Wong (Nine Arches Press, 2020)
Jennifer Wong’s third collection, 回家 Letters Home, is a moving addition to the 2020 Nine Arches Press lineup. Told in five sections, Wong’s poetry is in constant motion, as she reminisces xiaolongbao on the Hong Kong metro, reveals racism in a London Uber, and seeks comfort foods on foot in both cities. Utilizing map imagery, Wong topographically recounts her departure from Hong Kong to attend Oxford, and eventual immigration to London. When not in physical motion, Wong kept me in mental states of in-between as I navigated her languages and cultures, which shows when you live between identities, your body, mind, and spirit are constantly in flux. From the very first poem, “of butterflies,” “there” becomes synonymous with Hong Kong, while “here” is recognized as London. Though the collection is a love letter to Hong Kong, I couldn't help but wonder: If the cities were reversed, would the collection have the same title?
*Read full review here!
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03 Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition by Cathy Park Hong (One World, 2020)