2026 Book Award Citations

Outstanding Contribution Sunjeev Sahota The Spoiled Heart

The Spoiled Heart, a novel set among the South Asian diaspora in contemporary England, demonstrates Sahota’s ability to convey complex characters, inhabit distinct points of view, and to tell a very good story. At the same time, Sahota is a keen observer of our current moment, engaging in questions around race and class politics in the shadow of the pandemic. Readers will not soon forget the tragic story of the labor activist Nayan Olak. 

Honorable Mention Marie Mutsuki Mockett The Tree Doctor

The Tree Doctor is  a remarkable novel about desire, family, and the literal and figurative pleasures of gardening during the heart of the pandemic. Mockett is keenly aware of the importance of storytelling in how we understand and order our lives. 

Outstanding Contribution: Ward Toward by Cindy JuYoung Ok

“When I picture a country, the ground is newly stormed,” writes Cindy JuYoung Ok. Reading Ok’s Ward Toward is to experience the surprise of seeing an eccentric and deeply intelligent mind in action, a speaker who surveils all terrains, real and imagined, linguistic, discursive, and earthly, and each terrain is met with this sharp knowing, a knowing that is oddball, slightly tender, and yes, sometimes detached. “I respect anyone in touch with their rage” the speaker states, and then a line later, “I question a dream from the inside.” Ok’s poems are exploratory; they have strategies for unpacking the world and know how to “bargain with gods.” I found myself caught, then caught off-guard, and finally gutted, line after line, blown away by the mise-en-scene of the poems which might begin with a dissatisfaction with the metaphors of panic and then move to consider if molasses is a plural substance or not. You simply never know what is coming. What a relief that the usual plot of catharsis and volta can be radically reworked in the right voice. Brilliant.”

Honorable Mention: Asterism by Ae Hee Lee

Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is an exquisite paragon of the classic story of displacement, belonging, and lineage—a narrative Lee pushes with her rigorous attention to language until her many worlds pulse on the page. The multilingual poet’s dexterous balance of these worlds—from South Korea to Peru to the United States—moves the selves who inhabit them from lone asterisks toward a united asterism until the collection as well as the poet crescendos into a harmony of code-switching. It’s remarkable how delicately Lee carves her images, wielding words and lineation like chisels, producing poems that are nothing short of sculptural. Asterism is a poetic and personal triumph

Outstanding Contribution: The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History by Diego Luis

The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History is a sweeping and ambitious book about Asian mobility between Asia and the Americas. It is a book that radically rethinks the construction of race and Asian subjects in the early modern period and in a hemispheric and transpacific context. Diego Luis’s deep archival research masterfully bridges together Asian American history, global history, and Latin American history into a cohesive and compelling narrative. At the heart of this narrative, is a keen attention to the lived experiences of both free and enslaved Asians under Spanish (and Portuguese colonialism), who navigated shifting processes of racialization in Asia, in the passage across the Pacific, and in the Americas. Through this groundbreaking book, Luis reconceptualizes how we understand the history of Asian America.

Outstanding Contribution: Settler Millitarism: World War II in Hawai’i and the Making of US Empire by Juliet Nebolon

Settler Militarism makes an exciting theoretical intervention into scholarly conversation about settler colonialism, one of the strongest turns in Asian American studies in recent decades, positing it as inextricably intertwined with US militarism. Setting her study against the backdrop of Hawai’i as a military territory during World War II, Nebolon examines the construction and revision of race, indigeneity, and class amid the new structures and hierarchies created by wartime programs. With a varied archive of government documents, media, and ephemera spanning language, food, and medicine, Settler Militarism exposes the workings of biopower as a tool of empire disguised as an imperative of a just war. We also recognize Settler Militarism for its contributions to the study of Hawai’i and the Kanaka Maoli people, an understudied area for Asian American studies. Nebolon’s theoretical interventions will contribute to larger conversations around US militarism and racialization across fields.

Honorable Mention: The First Amerasians by Yuri Doolan 

The First Amerasians creatively interweaves the history of international adoption and US military prostitution to study the intersectional connections between mixed race Korean children and Korean women in the Cold War era. Doolan’s deep archival research and oral histories offer a new window into mid-century Korean migration to the US. Through incisive critique and empathetic storytelling, Doolan argues that the category of “the Amerasian” was a Cold War imperative, not an objective reality. In tracing the history of “the Amerasian” and its related narratives of American rescue, Doolan reveals the transnational impact of war and US militarism upon the intimate lives of children and women. The First Amerasians is an important interdisciplinary contribution to the study of migration, race in South Korea and the US, gendered and sexual intimacies of war, and transnational adoption.

Outstanding Contribution: All of Us or None by Monisha Das Gupta

Monisha Das Gupta’s All of Us or None is brilliant. An urgent appeal to learn from antideportation justice work in a moment when we all need it, the book stretches and brings together our intersectional interests in the study of migration and indigeneity. Through nuanced analyses and storytelling, it delineates our most difficult struggles against state and colonial violence. Das Gupta eloquently captures the raw power and intellectual intimacy of struggles for justice against “settler carcerality.”

Outstanding Contribution: dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss by Mimi Khuc

Mimi Khuc’s dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss is a field changer. It defies academic genre and takes Asian American studies to places where it has hesitated to tread. With cutting and compassionate insight, it reveals how discourses of wellness produce and exacerbate harm and how forms of collective care can generate alternative ways of working and living.

Honorable Mention: The Promise of Beauty by Mimi Thi Nguyen 

Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Promise of Beauty is an innovative and scintillating distillation of “beauty” in its multiple forms, conditions, and practices. Beauty is method, limitation, and possibility, and this book is an energetic and capacious offering that reorients how we relate to each other and to our world.

Outstanding Achievement: Worlds At The End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination by Pacharee Sudhinaraset

Capacious in scope and ambition, Pacharee Sudhinaraset’s Worlds At The End: Los Angeles, Infrastructure, and the Apocalyptic Imagination is a significant work of comparative racial analysis. Centering Los Angeles as an “imperial megalopolis”—a complex site of catastrophes as well as alternative lifeworlds—Sudhinaraset deftly demonstrates how narratives of Asian American, Indigenous, Latinx, and Black lives imbricate in new visions of futurity. Eschewing a simple method of comparison, Sudhinaraset reads palimpsestically to excavate the layers of settler colonization, militarism, capitalism, and war that create and destroy worlds, time and time again. Through careful attention to processes of regeneration in built environments, shared geographies, and human relations, the book propels us into the possibilities of transformation and collective persistence in the face of manufactured breakdown. Worlds At The End is a sophisticated and illuminating model for reading across histories and racial lines and, ultimately, it reminds us that Asian America is inevitably part of the apocalyptic imagination, what it means for racialized existence to end and then begin again.

Honorable Mention: Asian American Fiction after 1965 by Christopher T. Fan

Just when Asian Pacific American Studies was tiring of old readings of East Asian American culture, Christopher T. Fan delivers Asian American Fiction after 1965, a fresh approach that depends upon new socioeconomic realities. Fan begins where previous scholars end, drawing out the contemporary implications of tiger moms and model minorities. While such constructions have harmed recent Asian immigrants, Fan shows that “post-65” politics have also affected the writers of what he calls Northeast Asia. For Fan, the Asian American writer is a class formation, reading deindustrialization through a screen of STEM-inflected cultures. In this way, he offers the long-needed corrective of reading “Asia”—a troubled site of much STEM inflection—back into “Asian America.”     

Honorable Mention: Flexible India: Yoga’s Cultural and Political Tensions by Shameem Black

Shameem Black’s Flexible India: Yoga’s Cultural and Political Tensions is a thorough study of yoga. A notable feature of Black’s monograph is her skillfully assembled cultural, literary, and personal archive that includes folklore, yoga murder mysteries, court decisions, yoga rooms at the airport, and more. With this wide-ranging archive, she carefully unpacks the complex role that yoga plays in Hindu nationalism, the US racial landscape, US-India relations, global capitalism, and cross-cultural representation while also exploring its decolonial possibilities. Black cogently writes with interdisciplinary ease and theoretical erudition, providing a model for what an expanded, global Asian American studies can look like. 

Outstanding Contribution The Movies of Racial Childhoods by Celine Parreñas Shimizu 

Beautifully written and powerfully argued, The Movies of Racial Childhoods is a study of how Asian and Asian American children appear on the cinematic screen in our contemporary moment. The book reads as an archive of Asian and Asian American personhood in its diversity and complex modes and manners of identification, alienation and belonging. At the center of these cinematic formations are sexual becomings of Asian and Asian American children, whose tender emergence into quasi-adulthood is entangled with racial, as well as queer and non-normative modes of identity formation. What sets this book apart from other academic film theories is its deeply felt personal connection to the children on the screen. Parreñas Shimizu’s book is first and foremost an elegy to a lost child, a premature childhood death that permeates every page of the book. Few academic texts index the trauma and grief that underpin their objects of study and analytical methodologies. Parreñas Shimizu, in contrast, breaks with the norms of academic form to offer a narrative situated deep in the heart of a grieving mother. 

Honorable Mention: To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World by Yiman Wan

An important monograph on the pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World, charts what it meant to be a racialized Chinese American star on the silver screen in the first half of the twentieth century. Living through the Chinese Exclusion Act that exacerbated already exiting Orientalist discourses in the United States, Wong developed performative practices that allowed her to navigate everyday racist and sexist systems surrounding her life. Yang’s study pays close attention to Wong’s own narrativization of her life amidst media (mis)representations that brought her into the public realm. What emerges in the book is a woman whose labor is both public and private, and a site of negotiation for a self that exceeds the glamour of photographic and cinematic representations. 

Outstanding Contribution: Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora by Sharon Quinsaat 

Insurgent Communities advances a seemingly simple argument: that diasporas are not just formed through the process of migration but must be actively made through political and cultural work. This straightforward premise unfolds into a series of revelations and theoretical implications that make Sharon Quinsaat’s book truly remarkable. Examining Filipino migrants in the U.S. and the Netherlands, Quinsaat transforms the very concept of “diaspora” by asking how migrant subjects–often differentiated by class, region, fears and desires–come to understand themselves as part of a  diaspora. What kinds of practices and infrastructures make a collective identity possible? Through meticulous ethnographic and archival work, Quinsaat traces the material and imaginative work of becoming Filipino across several decades and multiple continents. The result is a tightly rendered yet capacious text, one that challenges several conventions: the assumed division not just between nation and diaspora but also between social movement work and identity work, between the dynamic process of migration and supposed settledness of community formation, and more. Theoretically sophisticated and materially grounded, Sharon Quinsaat’s Insurgent Communities both expands the field of Asian American Studies geographically and intellectually and returns it to its long-rooted insurgent imagination.

Outstanding Contribution: Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay

Nishant Upadhyay’s Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity is an outstanding scholarly work.  Theoretically ambitious, methodologically expansive and creative, and written with energy and passion, this book examines Indian diasporic migration to Canada, asking how brahminical caste systems articulate with the structures and processes of settler colonialism on Turtle Island in such a way that dominant caste Indians become complicit in the violent subordination and ongoing erasure of Indigenous lives and cultures.  Attentive as well to antiblackness, capitalism, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy, Upadhyay’s research zooms in on and brilliantly illuminates the racialized, gendered, and casted labor formations that grew up around resource extraction in British Columbia in the 1970s through 1990s and Alberta today.  It is a story which makes a significant contribution to Asian American Studies and adjacent fields by deepening our understanding of Asian diasporic experiences  and showing how structures of power operating at different geographic scales can reinforce and compound one another, while also leaving openings for challenge from below.  At a time when the erasure of Indigenous history and claims is accelerating on Turtle Island, Upadhyay’s book calls us to recognize and respond to the ongoing crisis.

Honorable Mention: Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building During Crisis by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez’s Caregivers is a groundbreaking and deeply personal, humane work that transforms our understanding of Filipina/o migrant caregivers.  Too often, Filipina/o caregivers have been subject to the reductionist trope of being “inherently” caring. Francisco-Menchavez draws from a mosaic of research—ethnography, interviews, survey research—to counteract this narrative and properly render the full spectrum of Filipina/o caregivers’ humanity.  Additionally, she conceptualized a methodological innovation: kuwentahan, a non-extractive, community-centered approach to social science research that unearths the structural inequalities while centering the care, joy, and resistance of Filipina/o caregivers.  Caregivers offers a major contribution to several fields, including sociology, anthropology, Filipinx and Asian American studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, labor studies, and public health. It is a model text that both emerging and seasoned scholars will have much to gain from. Perhaps most importantly, in the beauty of its storytelling, it is a book that has and will continue to resonate beyond the ivory tower, in the broader Filipina/o community, as well as other diasporic migrant communities fighting the forces of racial capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of globalization.