After months and really, years of anticipation, my debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs has a cover at long last! I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting, how deeply fulfilling, how incredibly satisfying it is to see the face of this novel. Part of my excitement is based on the fact that this novel was my MFA thesis at Notre Dame. I finished a version of this novel back in 2007 and then spent the next twelve years revising it over and over again, mostly on my own and then later with Sunyoung at Kaya Books, whose brilliance really helped push this book and who fought so hard for it. She lit did everything in her power to get the board to accept it for publication. When they rejected this novel, my heart was broken for years. It hurt even more that this book was rejected by the only mainland AAPI press in the whole country. Talk about damage to my soul!

The truth is, I actually abandoned this novel for years, heartbroken and afraid that I was the only one who saw its literary worth. In the back of my mind, though, there was this silent voice in my head that knew the board was wrong, that they didn’t know a dope book when they saw one. I believed that this book would someday find the right publisher, that with enough revision, dedication, dedication, and hard work, I could not only turn this novel in the tiny little masterpiece that it is today, but just as importantly, find the right home for it. I just needed to find the right (small) press that published transgressive work, that sought books that were audacious, creative, ambitious, multimodal, highly imaginative, beautiful, and a little experimental, and that’s exactly what I found when Leland, the editor at 7.13 Books, emailed me and said his 2021 catalog was full but that he was open to bumping my novel to the 2022 catalog. I said fuck yes and now my baby has a face!

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