Kawika Guillermo is an award-winning author and third generation Filipinx American whose family is primarily from Hawai’i and Texas. He has lived in Portland, Las Vegas, Seattle, Gimhae South Korea, Nanjing China, Hong Kong, and Vancouver Canada. His debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel (2018), won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Creative Prose, and in 2023 was adapted into a free-to-play video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. His follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom (2020), won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. His first prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was published in September 2023 by Duke University Press. Kawika publishes academic work under his patrilineal/legal name, Christopher B. Patterson, where he works as Graduate Chair and Associate Professor of The Social Justice Institute at The University of British Columbia. His research and teaching focus on literature, video games, and new media through the lens of Asian North American studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. His first academic book, Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific (Rutgers University Press, 2018), won the American Studies Association’s 2020 Shelley Fishkin Prize in Transnational American Studies, and his second, Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games (New York University Press, 2020) was a finalist for both the 2020 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, and the 2021 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. His articles have appeared in Positions, American Literature, Cultural Studies, American Quarterly, and other venues. He is the co-editor of two anthologies forthcoming in 2024: Transpacific, Undisciplined (University of Washington Press), and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us (Duke University Press). Kawika is an engaged public intellectual, and has given interviews for the major media outlets, and has been lead faculty organizer for the Lind Initiative and Games in Action, the largest video game expo hosted by UBC. In 2013, he founded the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies, and in 2020, he founded The JAAS Podcast, the home podcast for The Journal of Asian American Studies, where he served as Book Review Editor for three years. He currently serves as the Managing Editor for decomp journal, where he has volunteered since 2011. His commitment to teaching was recognized in 2018 when he was awarded Hong Kong Baptist University’s Arts Faculty Early Career Teaching Award.