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| photo: Sylvie Rosokoff | |
Kyle Lucia Wu is the programs & communications director at Kundiman, a nonprofit dedicated to nurturing Asian American literature, and she teaches creative writing at Fordham University, the New School and Catapult. Wu has received the Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins fellowship and residencies from the Byrdcliffe Colony, the Millay Colony, Plympton's Writing Downtown Residency and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Her first novel is Win Me Something (Tin House, November 2, 2021), a coming-of-age story about what it means to grow up in a "blended" but fractured family, and how what is left unsaid, unheard and unfelt can shape us in unexpected ways.
On your nightstand now:
Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami; I'm fresh off reading the soothing, spellbinding Strange Weather in Tokyo and excited for her forthcoming collection, People from My Neighborhood. I love reading fiction in translation for many reasons but partly because it shows a freedom from the restriction of Western plot structures.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt, which is about a 12-year-old boy sent to poll the kingdom for the true definition of "delicious." No one can agree and war threatens to break out because of it. As a child, I must have loved the clarity in which everyone declared their own definitions, and the realization that you can unite people without homogenizing them.
Your top five authors:
James Baldwin
Ruth Ozeki
T Kira Madden
Patricia Smith
Tiana Clark
Book you've faked reading:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. Though after reading Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties, where Moby Dick plays a part in the story "Human Development," I keep wanting to start reading it for real.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung, a piercing, spare, beautifully observed meditation on grief, inheritance and family. I cry every time I read it, as if it's my first time encountering it, and it's taught me so much about how to engage the reader using space, trust and absence on the page.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Recently, Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, which paid off extremely well, as it was fantastic.
Book you hid from your parents:
I never had to hide a book from my parents, but they may have raised an eyebrow at how many times I read Please Kill Me, the oral history of the punk movement by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil.
Book that changed your life:
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang was revelatory to me in its rendering of Chinese American girlhood--tender, grotesque, earnest and obscene.
Favorite line from a book:
"I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation." --Richard Siken, Crush
Five books you'll never part with:
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
Rose by Li-Young Lee
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Living for Change by Grace Lee Boggs
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, which is a book I've read and taught countless times and know very well. But sometimes knowing a book so well means it's impossible to reread it without all your past selves ricocheting around. It was so electrifying to read it for the first time; I wonder what it would be like to confront that clarity and conviction anew.