Nominations for the 2024-2025 Book Awards are Now Closed

Book Awards

Each year, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) recognizes authors and contributors in its book awards for titles of merit published in history, social science, creative writing, and humanities and cultural studies.

Creative Writing: Poetry
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Indecent Hours by James Fujinami Moore

HONORABLE MENTION: Customs by Solmaz Sharif

HONORABLE MENTION: All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran

Creative Writing: Prose
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Nuclear Family by Joseph Han

HONORABLE MENTION: Mother Ocean Father Nation by Nishant Batsha

History
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire by Helen Jin Kim

HONORABLE MENTION: Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by  Moon-Ho Jung

HONORABLE MENTION: Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1946 by Tessa Winkelmann

Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Work
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia by Y-Dang Troeung

HONORABLE MENTION: Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 by Jeannie Shinozuka

HONORABLE MENTION: Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries by Jodi Kim

Literary Studies
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Minor Salvage by Stephen Hong Sohn

HONORABLE MENTION: Pedagogies of Woundedness by James Kyung-jin Lee

Media, Performance, and Visual Studies
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium by Mila Zuo

HONORABLE MENTION: Model Minority Masochism: Performing the Cultural Politics of Asian American Masculinity by Takeo Rivera

Social Sciences
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT: Contesting the Last Frontier: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Political Representation of Asian Americans by Pei-Te Lien and Nicole Filler 

HONORABLE MENTION: The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program by Pallavi Banerjee

Creative Writing: Poetry
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Susan Nguyen, Dear Diaspora (Nebraska)

Creative Writing: Prose
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Eugene Lim, Search History (Coffee House)

HONORABLE MENTION — Julietta Singh, The Breaks: An Essay (Coffee House)

Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Lily Cho, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (McGill-Queens)

HONORABLE MENTION — Neel Ahuja, Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina)

HONORABLE MENTION — Ma Vang, History on the Run: Secrecy, Fugitivity, and Hmong Refugee Epistemologies (Duke University Press)

History
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Eric C. Wat, Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (University of Washington)

HONORABLE MENTION — Anna Pegler-Gordon, Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island (University of North Carolina)

HONORABLE MENTION — Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Empire′s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke)

Media, Performance, and Visual Studies
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Việt Lê, Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sai Gon and Phnom Penh (Duke)

HONORABLE MENTION — Hentyle Yapp, Minor China: Methods, Materialism, and the Aesthetic (Duke)

Literary Studies
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Erin Suzuki, Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures (Temple)

HONORABLE MENTION — David Roh, Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Stanford)

Social Sciences
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT — Nadia Kim, Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA (Stanford)

HONORABLE MENTION — Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke)

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Christine Hong for A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific 

Honorable Mention: Long Le-Khac for Giving Form to an Asian & Latinx America

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies
Sean Metzger for The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization

Honorable Mention: Bakirathi Mani for Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America

Social Sciences
No winner awarded

The Social Science Book Award subcommittee are in unanimous agreement that the three books submitted for consideration of the 2020 social science book award did not deeply engage both the Asian American (or AAPI) Studies and the social science studies germane to the research question(s) at hand. This is an exceptionally low number of submitted books for this award relative to previous years. Therefore, the Association for Asian American Studies regretfully will not be able to award a 2020 book prize in the category of social science books. We are committed to continuing our recognition of Asian American Studies scholarship in the social sciences and hope that we have a robust competition next year.

History
Uzma Quraishi for Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War

Honorable Mentions: Jana K. Lipman for In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates; Greg Robinson for The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans

Creative Writing: Prose
J. Koh for The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir

Honorable Mention: Lysley Tenorio for The Son of Good Fortune

Creative Writing: Poetry
Marianne Chan for All Heathens

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Quynh Nhu Le for Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies
Kandice Chuh for The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man”

Honorable Mention: David L. Eng and Shinhee Han for Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

Social Sciences
Jian Neo Chen for Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement

Honorable Mentions: Keith L. Camacho for Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam; Victoria Reyes for Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines

History
Monica Kim for The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

Honorable Mention: Maile Arvin for Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania

Creative Writing: Prose
Xuan Juliana Wang for Home Remedies: Stories

Honorable Mention: Ricco Villanueva Siasoco for The Foley Artist: Stories

Creative Writing: Poetry
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley for Colonize Me

Honorable Mentions: Jenifer Sang Eun Park for Autobiography of Horse; Jan-Henry Gray for Documents

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Stephen Hong Sohn for Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies
Elizabeth W. Son for Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress

Honorable Mention: Stephanie Nohelani Teves for Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance

Social Sciences
Jan M. Padios for A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines

Honorable Mention: Valerie Francisco-Menchavez for The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age

History
Renisa Mawani for Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire

Honorable Mention: Simeon Man for Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific

Creative Writing: Prose
Kawika Guillermo for Stamped: an anti-travel novel

Creative Writing: Poetry
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs for Interrogation Room

Honorable Mention: Faisal Mohyuddin for The Displaced Children of Displaced Children

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Crystal Parikh for Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies
Nancy Yunhwa Rao for Chinatown Opera Theater in North America

Honorable Mention: ShiPu Wang for The Other American Moderns: Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa

Social Sciences
Eric J. Pido for Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity

Honorable Mention: Lalaie Ameeriar for Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora

History
Julian Lim for Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Creative Writing: Prose
Karen Tei Yamashita for Letters to Memory

Creative Writing: Poetry
Margaret Rhee for Love, Robot

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Lisa Yoneyama for Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinary/Media Studies
Carlis Roberts for Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration

Social Sciences
Laura Madokoro for Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants and the Cold War

History
Naomi Paik for Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II

Creative Writing: Prose
Shawna Yang Ryan for Green Island

Creative Writing: Poetry
Solomaz Sharif for Look

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Literary Studies
Keith Feldman for A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America

Humanities & Cultural Studies: Multidisciplinary Approaches
Grace Kyungwon Hong for Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference

Social Sciences
Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou for The Asian American Achievement Paradox

History
Madeline Y. Hsu for The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority

Creative Writing: Prose
Viet Nguyen for The Sympathizer: A Novel

Creative Writing: Poetry
Amanda Ngoho Reavey for Marilyn

Cultural Studies
Vernadette Gonzalez for Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines

Creative Writing: Poetry
Wing Tek Lum for The Nanjing Massacre: Poems

Creative Writing: Prose
Ruth Ozeki for A Tale for the Time Being

Social Science
Gilda Ochoa for Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap

History
Vivek Bald for Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Literary Criticism
Min Hyoung Song for The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American

Cultural Studies
Lisa Nakamura for Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet 

Poetry/Prose
Preeta Samarasan for Evening is the Whole Day 

Honorable Mentions: Wendy Lee for Happy Family and Julie Shikeguni for Unending Nora

Social Sciences
Lynn Fujiwara for Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and Welfare Reform 

Jamillah Karim for American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender Within the Ummah

History
Scott Kurashige for The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles 

Honorable Mention: Gordon H. Chang, with Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul J. Karlstrom (eds.) for Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970

Literary Studies
Josephine Nock-Hee Park for Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics 

Honorable Mention: Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn for Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography

Awards given for books published in 2003

Social Sciences
Yen Le Espiritu for Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries

Poetry/Prose
Linh Dinh for All Around What Empties Out

Monique Truong for The Book of Salt

History
Catherine Ceniza Choy for Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History

Erika Lee for At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

Cultural Studies
Elaine Kim, Margo Machida, Sharon Mizota, (eds.) for Fresh Talk, Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art 

Honorable Mention: Martin Manalansan for Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

Awards given for books published in 2001

Social Sciences
Viranjini P. Munasinghe for Callaloo or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad

Cultural Studies
Anthony Lee for Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco

History
Nayan Shah for Contagious Divide: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown

Prose/Prose
Brian Ascalon Roley for American Son

Special Award for Most Outstanding Reference Tool on Asian American History
Gary Y. Okihiro for The Columbia Guide to Asian American History

Awards given for books published in 2000

Cultural Studies
Martin Manalansan for Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America

History
Madeline Hsu for Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943

Poetry/Prose
Priscilla Lee for Wishbone

David Wong Louie for The Barbarians are Coming

Awards given for books published in 1999

History/ Social Sciences
Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (eds.) for Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era

John Kuo Wei Tchen for New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882

Poetry/Prose
Frank Chin for Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays

Cultural Studies
Aihwa Ong for Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality

David Eng and Alice Hom (eds.) for Q & A: Queer and Asian American

Awards given for books published in 1997

History/ Social Sciences
Kyeyoung Park for The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City 

Fiction Award — Rescinded.
Lois Ann Yamanaka for Blu’s Hanging

Cultural Studies/ Literary
Dorinne K. Kondo for About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater 

Poetry
Roy K. Kiyooka for Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka

Awards given for books published in 1995

History
Judy Yung for Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

Special Award
Mary Kimoto Tomita for Dear Miye: Letters Home From Japan, 1939 – 1946 

Cultural Studies
Annette White-Parks for Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

Literature
Sigrid Nunez for A Feather on the Breath of God

Awards given for books published in 1993

Lois-Ann Yamanaka for Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre

Barbara Kawakami for Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii 1885-1941

Faye Myenne Ng for Bone

Yen Le Espiritu for Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities

Awards given for books published in 1991

Gary Y. Okihiro for Cane Fires, The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945

Darrell H. Lum for Pass On, No Pass Back! 

Stephen S. Fugita and David J. O’Brien for Japanese American Ethnicity: The Persistence of Community

Stephen H. Sumida for And the View From the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i

Awards given for books published in 1990

Jessica Hagedorn for Dogeaters

Mary Paik Lee for Quiet Odyssey, A Pioneer Korean Woman in America

Awards given for books published in 1989

Asian Women United of California (eds.) for Making Waves: Writing By and About Asian American Women

Ronald Takaki for Strangers From a Different Shore, A History of Asian Americans 

James M. Freeman for Hearts of Sorrow, Vietnamese- American Lives

Awards given for books published in 1988

Yuji Ichioka for The Issei, The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924

Hisaye Yamamoto for Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories

Awards given for books published in 1987

Sucheng Chan for This Bitter Sweet Soil, The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910

Awards given for books published in 1986

Wing Tek Lum for Expounding the Doubtful Points

Edward D. Beechert for Working in Hawaii, A Labor History 

Timothy J. Lukes and Gary Y. Okihiro for Japanese Legacy, Farming and Community Life in California’s Santa Clara Valley

Sandy Lydon for Chinese Gold, The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region