Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
The current editors of Kaya Press are Sunyoung Lee and Neelanjana Banerjee. The board of directors includes Jean Ho, Huy Hong, Adria Imada, Juliana S. Koo, Sunyoung Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chez Bryan Ong, and Patricia Wakida, and the editorial committee consists of Lisa Chen, Neelanjana Banerjee, Sunyoung Lee, Warren Liu, Gerald Maa, and Sesshu Foster.
Kaya Press publishes fiction, experimental poetry, critical essays, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, and the recovery of important and overlooked work (e.g. "lost novels") from the Pacific Rim and the API diaspora. Kaya identifies as "a group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas." Kaya Press participated in a selection of literary events, such as the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Literature Festival and the LA Times Festival of Books.
Branding "Kaya" refers to the tribal confederation of six Korean city-states that existed from the middle of the first until the sixth century CE that is remembered as a utopia of learning, music, and the arts due to its trade and communication with China, Japan, and India. This word has multiple meanings across different languages: in Sanskrit, "kaya" means "body"; in Japanese, "kaya" often refers to a type of yew tree that withstands harsh conditions; in Tagalog, it means "to be able"; and in Turkish it means "rock"; in Zulu, "kaya" means "home". Like its name, Kaya Press's publishing vision is to explore the multiple connections, chance or otherwise, between cultures.
Kaya's logo evokes the smoking tiger featured in many Korean folk paintings. Kaya's tiger smokes a cigar in lieu of the traditional Asian pipe to connect the historical with the contemporary.
Awards Kaya press and authors' awards include Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Award, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award
Authors and books Kaya Press writers include:
Casio Abe – Born in 1958, Casio Abe is a critic, poet, professor and author of several books on Japanese film and popular culture. From 2007 to March 2012, he was appointed as the professor for the Faculty of Arts, Course of Philosophy and Creative Writing at Rikkyo University. Since April 2012, he is an associate professor at Hokkaido University Graduate School of Letters, Filmology and Cultural Studies of Representation. His most recent books include “Nihon Eiga no 21 Seiki ga Hajimaru” (2005 Kinema Junposha), “Mikio Naruse” (2005 Kawade Shobo Shinsha), “Boku ha Konna Nichijo ya Kanjo de dekiteimasu” (2007 Shobunsha) and “Manga ha Ugoku” (2008 Izumi Shobo). He published his first poetry book in 2008. He reviews films, subculture and literature from perspectives using various techniques with the ability to reconstruct in great detail. He is one of the few with monographs in both areas of film and subculture. His book, Beat Takeshi vs Takeshi Kitano was published through Kaya Press in 2004. Genpei Akasegawa – He emerged on the Japanese art scene around 1960, starting in the radical “Anti-Art” movement and becoming a member of the seminal artist collectives Neo Dada and Hi Red Center. The epic piece Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963–1974), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, cemented his place as an inspired conceptualist. His irreverent humor and cunning observation of everyday life made him popular as a writer, peaking with his 1998 book Rõjinryoku, in which he put forth a hilariously positive take on the declining capabilities of the elderly. Hyperart: Thomasson (Kaya Press 2010), marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from a subversive culture to a popular culturatus. Hari Alluri – At the age of twelve, Hari Alluri immigrated to Vancouver, Coast Salish territories. He is the author of Carving Ashes (CiCAC, 2013) and The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel, 2016). A poet, educator, and teaching artist, his work appears widely in anthologies, journals and online venues, including Chautauqua, Poemeleon and Split This Rock. He is a founding editor at Locked Horn Press, where he has co-edited two anthologies, Gendered & Written: Forums on Poetics and Read America(s): An Anthology. He holds an MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and, along with the Federico Moramarco Poetry International Teaching Prize, he has received VONA/Voices and Las Dos Brujas fellowships and a National Film Board of Canada grant. Hari currently serves as editor of pacific Review in San Diego, Kumeyaay land. His book, The Flayed City was published through Kaya Press on March 8, 2017. Nobuo Ayukawa – Nobuo Ayukawa was born in Tokyo in 1920 and is considered the “pilot” of modern Japanese poetry. He was one of the founding poets of the Arechi (Wasteland) group, and translated the work of T.S. Eliot and William Burroughs into Japanese. Ayukawa rejected traditional Japanese poetic concerns, mining his past experiences as a soldier in World War II and paying homage to his literary influences in abstract, lyrical modernist works that collaged remembered conversations among friends with literary quotations taken (and in some cases, reworked) from Mann, Eliot, Kafka, Pound and others. In addition to being a much-admired poet and translator, Ayukawa was a well-respected literary and social critic. He published over a dozen books of poetry, essays and literary criticism. He died in Tokyo in 1986. His book, America and Other Poems was published through Kaya Press in 2007. Roddy Bogawa – Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Japanese American filmmaker Roddy Bogawa is known for his film and video works which investigates history and culture via lyrical and innovative narrative structures. First gaining attention as one of the “Asian American Bad Boys” along with Gregg Araki and Jon Moritsugu, his work along with theirs and several other film school educated directors signaled a shift in practice from the social activist and documentary films which had marked the first wave of Asian American cinema to a more expansive exploration of identity and culture. He studied art and played in punk bands before turning to filmmaking receiving his MFA degree from the University of California at San Diego studying with director Jean-Pierre Gorin, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and critic Manny Farber. His awards and grants include Creative Capital Foundation, the American Center Foundation, the Jerome Foundation Independent Filmmaker grant, a NYFA fellowship, and New York State Council on the Arts. He currently lives in New York City and works as a professor at New Jersey City University. In 2013, he was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that screened fourteen of his films and videos over a week titled If Films Could Smell. His book, If Films Could Smell, the assemblage of interviews and writings by Bogawa from his nearly thirty years as a filmmaker and artist, was published through Kaya Press on April 25, 2017. Luis Cabalquinto – Born in the Magarao, Philippines, Luis Cabalquinto first came to the United States in 1968. He is a veteran Filipino American poet. He studied writing at Cornell University, the New School, and New York University. Cabalquinto writes in English, Pilipino, and Bikol. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a Balagtas Award from the Writers’ Union of the Philippines, a Dylan Thomas Poetry Award from the New School, an Academy of American Poets Poetry Award, and a Writing Fellowship Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York and the Philippines. His book, Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) was published through Kaya Press in 2001. Brian Castro – Brian Castro is a novelist and essayist. he is adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide and was inaugural director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. Shanghai Dancing was published through Kaya Press in 2009. Sam Chanse – Sam Chanse is a writer and theater artist based in New York and California. A 2015 Sundance Ucross Playwright Fellow and member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, her work has also been supported by the Lark Play Development Center, Labyrinth Theater, Leviathan Lab, the Actors Studio Playwrights/Directors Unit, Second Generation, Ars Nova, Bindlestiff Studio, Asian American Theater Company, Tofte Lake Center, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She received her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University, and in musical theater writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She served as the artistic director of San Francisco-based arts nonprofit Kearny Street Workshop, and as co-director of Locus Arts. Her book, Lydia's Funeral Video was published through Kaya Press in 2015. Anelise Chen – Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. She hails from Temple City, California, and received a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and she will be a 2019 Literature Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University and writes a column on mollusks for The Paris Review. Lisa Chen – She was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Iowa. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance writer and editor. Mouth (Kaya Press 2007), Chen's debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. Floyd Cheung – Born in Hong Kong, Cheung grew up in Las Vegas. He is a professor and teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature as well as the American Studies Program at Smith College. He teaches courses in American literature, American studies and Asian American literature and culture. In each of these fields, Cheung has published articles in academic journals. He is particularly interested in the interpretation and recovery of early Asian American texts, and he has published several articles about and edited multiple volumes by forgotten or lesser-known authors. Cheung is also a member of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program, for which he served as the founding chair. In 2012, he was awarded Smith's Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. From 2014 to the present, Cheung has been serving as the director of the Sherrerd Center for Teaching and Learning. Cheung also writes poetry. Edited by Cheung, The Hanging on Union Square (Kaya Press 2013) is H.T. Tsiang's satiric, quasi-experimental novel which explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York – an era of union busting and food lines – in an ambitious style that combines humor-laced allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non sequiturs, and slogans.