Celebrating My Short Story Collection

My short story collection Hard Skin is finally available for preorder from Juventud Press!

It’s been a very long and very windy and very crazy road to get here.

I wrote the first story in an undergrad class with Anthony Doerr in the early 00s.

I wrote more during my MFA days (five years!).

I took six years off from writing after that (basically I moved to Japan and stopped writing - burnout, maybe?).

I started writing again in fall 2014 and got my first ever publication in 2015.

I submitted it 24 times to various contests and publishers.

I placed in two contests and got all the rejections from the publishers… until last summer when I went all in on a new press I found working with BIPOC and marginalized voices and they accepted it.

So here I am celebrating my success and perseverance.

I just made some cute swag (I hope) for all of the wonderful people who are preordering my book!! Thank you so much to all of you!! Mahalo Nui Loa!