Lehua Taitano's work investigates queer indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora. In this conversation, Lehua delves into the oceanic world of her poetry collection, "Inside Me an Island," where matters of family, story, identity, voice, song, and bicycle mechanics come to light.
Kikkawa has been researching Hawaiʻi history, including criminal history, for a series of novels set in the 1950s. His first book, "Kona Winds," is a detective noir set in a very flavorful Honolulu.
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by Lisa Linn Kanae
Islands Linked by Ocean is more than a collection of Hawai‘i-based short stories: It’s the verbal equivalent of a heavy, glossy coffee table book full of in-the-moment images imbued with a unique elegance and wonder by the artist who captured them. Lisa Linn Kanae conjures frame after frame, many familiar to most of us, but in a light that brings out a grace we never knew existed: a veteran steersman berating his novice stroker, the banter and gossip of women in an office breakroom, a starving dog tied to a chain-link fence behind a dumpster. My own favorite is the title story which ironically contains the least amount of fiction maybe because I, too, had a McKinley-alum dad who could croon like Dean Martin. And I never realized how beautifully he did so until I read Kanae’s work about her own father.