Kawika Guillermo

Kawika Guillermo is an award-winning author of six books and a queer, neurodivergent Filipinx American. Their debut novel, Stamped: an anti-travel novel, won the 2020 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. In 2023, Kawika adapted the book into a video game, Stamped: an anti-travel game. Their follow-up speculative fiction novel, All Flowers Bloom, won the 2021 Reviewers Choice Gold Award for Best General Fiction/Novel. Their prose-poetry book, Nimrods: a fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir, was a Finalist for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Their most recent book, Of Floating Isles: on growing pains and video games, mixes memoir with cultural commentary and game analysis.

Kawika publishes academic work under their patrilineal name, Christopher B. Patterson, where they work as associate professor of Social Justice at The University of British Columbia. Their books include Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games, and Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) About Us. Their final sole-authored academic book, Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination, will be released in March, 2026.