I’m so proud to be a part of the Let’s Get Lit Book Festival! It’s an online book festival with author interviews from all sorts of marginalizations. I’m helping to host the Asian Authors and today’s post will be a spotlight on the books for the authors I will be covering. Later this week I’ll post their interview questions. You can also check out the other Asian authors on Krisha and Noura‘s blog!
Featured Authors
Traci Chee – Author of We Are Not Free
Traci Chee is the New York Times bestselling author of The Reader Trilogy and We Are Not Free (HMH, June 2020). An all-around word geek, she loves book arts and art books, poetry and paper crafts, though she also dabbles at egg painting, bonsai gardening, and hosting game nights for family and friends. She studied literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and earned a master of arts degree from San Francisco State University. Traci grew up in a small town with more cows than people, and now feels most at home in the mountains, scaling switchbacks and happening upon hidden highland lakes. She lives in California with her fast-fast dog.
Elizabeth Lim – Author of Unravel the Dusk
Elizabeth Lim grew up on a hearty staple of fairy tales, myths, and songs. Her passion for storytelling began around age 10, when she started writing fanfics for Sailor Moon, Sweet Valley, and Star Wars, and posted them online to discover, “Wow, people actually read my stuff. And that’s kinda cool!” But after one of her teachers told her she had “too much voice” in her essays, Elizabeth took a break from creative writing to focus on not flunking English.
Over the years, Elizabeth became a film and video game composer, and even went so far as to get a doctorate in music composition. But she always missed writing, and she turned to penning stories when she needed a breather from grad school. One day, she decided to write and finish a novel — for kicks, at first, then things became serious — and she hasn’t looked back since.
Elizabeth loves classic film scores, books with a good romance, food (she currently has a soft spot for arepas and Ethiopian food), the color turquoise, overcast skies, English muffins, cycling, and baking. She grew up in Northern California, with a brief stint in Tokyo, Japan, but now lives in New York City with her husband and their daughter.
Elizabeth graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in music and a secondary in East Asian Studies. She completed her graduate degrees (MM, DMA) at The Juilliard School.
She is represented by Gina Maccoby of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency.
Roselle Lim – Author of Vanessa Yu’s Magical Tea Shop
Roselle Lim was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada as a child. She lived in north Scarborough in a diverse, Asian neighbourhood.
She found her love of writing by listening to her lola (paternal grandmother’s) stories about Filipino folktales. Growing up in a household where Chinese superstition mingled with Filipino Catholicism, she devoured books about mythology, which shaped the fantasies in her novels.
An artist by nature, she considers writing as “painting with words.”
She is represented by Jenny Bent of The Bent Agency.
Mae Respicio – Author of Any Day With You
Mae is author of the middle grade novels THE HOUSE THAT LOU BUILT (out now), ANY DAY WITH YOU (out May 5, 2020), and EVERYTHING STARTS WITH NOTHING (out 2021) from Random House Children’s Books. She is the past recipient of a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship and a David Henry Hwang Writers Institute scholarship for playwriting, and has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her writing & photography has been published in a variety of places including Pregnancy Magazine, Working Mother Magazine, Patagonia, Pottery Barn Kids, Red Tricycle and The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image, and Other Hazards of Being Female (Seal Press), among others. She worked with the Filipino-American community of Los Angeles to edit the nonfiction book Images of America: Filipinos in Los Angeles (Arcadia Publishing).
Kelly Yang – Author of Parachutes
Kelly Yang is the New York Times bestselling author of FRONT DESK, winner of the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature, PARACHUTES (YA debut novel, May 2020, Harpercollins) and THREE KEYS (Front Desk Sequel, Sept 2020, Scholastic). FRONT DESK is Kelly’s award-winning middle grade debut novel about a 10 year old Chinese American immigrant girl who manages the front desk of a motel while her parents clean the rooms. FRONT DESK was awarded the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the Parents’ Choice Gold Medal, is the 2019 Global Read Aloud, and has earned numerous other honors including being named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year, a NPR Best Book of the Year, and a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year.