AAAS 2025 Book Award Winners

It is our distinct privilege to announce that the AAAS Book Awards Committee and its panel of jurors has officially completed adjudicating the nominations for the 2025 book awards cycle. We are very grateful  to the AAAS staff for facilitating the nomination process and publicity.

We are deeply grateful to our esteemed juries who reviewed dozens of submissions within a 6-month period. The AAAS Book Awards are only possible through the diligent and generous participation and volunteerism of members, as well as presses and authors. 

The AAAS Book Awards serves as our organization’s major platform for the author’s work to be publicly honored as exceptional and deserving of special recognition. It’s also a process that allows our association to deeply appreciate the years of research, writing, analyzing, and theorizing infused in the projects represented. The books nominated prove the vibrancy of Asian American studies scholarship and writing, and the field’s indispensable contribution to understandings of everyday survival, world-historic change, planetary struggle, axes of solidarity, most especially during the ongoing onslaught against Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and all our disciplines.

To all those nominated: Thank you for the work and giving the process such depth and elevating Asian American Studies. To the awardees: Congratulations and we look forward to honoring you and celebrating your accomplishments in Boston!

Chair:
Francis Tanglao Aguas (Drexel University)

Members:
Rishi Ramesh Gune (University of California, Irvine)
James Zarsadiaz (University of San Francisco)
Shalini Shankar (Northwestern University)

AAAS President:
Martin Manalansan (Rutgers University)

2025 AAAS BOOK AWARDS WINNERS

Creative Writing: Poetry

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes
• HONORABLE MENTION: Bianca by Eugenia Leigh

Creative Writing: Prose

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
• HONORABLE MENTION: Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin

History

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change by Melissa May Borja
• HONORABLE MENTION: Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941 by  Genevieve Clutario

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Work

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz
• HONORABLE MENTION: Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy Across Empire by Mel Y. Chen

Literary Studies

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience by Vinh Nguyen
• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Becoming Global Asia Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore by Cheryl Narumi Naruse
• HONORABLE MENTION: Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War by Audrey Wu Clark

Media, Performance, and Visual Studies

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics by  Salar Mameni
• HONORABLE MENTION: Maid for Television: Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy  by L.S. Kim

Social Sciences

• OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World by Claire Jean Kim
• HONORABLE MENTION: Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform: Citizenship, Belonging, and the Limits of Assimilation by Dana Nakano

Read full citations for award winners and honorable mentions.