Before the Young Adult became the edgy, best-selling genre it is today, Kaya Press was publishing cutting edge stories about Asian diasporic young people that changed the world.

R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling The Rs tells the stories of young people in Kalihi, Hawaii in a way that no one had ever allowed children to exist on the page before. A few years later Ed Lin wrote Waylaid, a novel about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American kid growing up in a cheap motel by the Jersey Shore that was raw, unfiltered, and widely loved.

Now, both of these authors have new Young Adult books — Ed Lin’s David Tung Can’t Have A Girlfriend Until He Gets Into An Ivy League College and R. Zamora Linmark’s The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart. They’ll be in conversation with Rachelle Cruz to talk through writing about young people then, and now, and more.

Asian American YA Authors: Then and Now

Ed Lin and R. Zamora Linmark in conversation with Rachelle Cruz

Monday November 30th | 4:30 PM PST | On Zoom

Register for event here: https://bit.ly/AsianAmYA

This event is organized in collaboration with Kaya Press | UCLA Asian American Studies Department | Loyola Marymount Asian Pacific American Studies Department | CSU San Marcos Ethnic Studies | CSU San Marcos Common Read