📚 nationally bestselling novels Exhibit & The Incendiaries • Lambda Literary Prize • 2025-2026 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow • substack.com/@rokwon
San Francisco
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Things that are truly pro-life:
- abolishing the death penalty
- vastly improved prenatal care
- universal health care
- vaccinations
- better gun laws
Things that are deeply hateful & not at all pro-life:
- this whole fucking travesty of a misogynistic Georgia abortion law
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who else has the type of anxiety that tells you that, if you stay hypervigilant & informed & if you, in detail, imagine every possible bad outcome, you will thereby ward off harm to yourself & your whole community like some kind of powerful, jumpy magician
& how are you doing
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that sounds great. Whatever works for everyone! Not a problem. Up for anything. Down for anything. Yes to all of the above! Does anyone have a preference? Either sounds excellent. I'm open to options! I have no needs. I have no wants. I'm a lady
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shoutout to all the anxious people who anticipated roughly this level of chaos & feel nothing but miserable about having been right
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the physical fatigue that comes with feeling grief every single day about the country you live in, the people who run it, the world you inhabit
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well I was six when a white boy handed me a note saying “I don’t like Coreans” so maybe start at the same time as the spelling lessons
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humans have fucked up so much but we did also come up with the idea of putting bits of food into little dough wrappers & the collective genius involved makes me emotional. Mandu. Gyoza. Har gow. Pierogi. Momos. Ravioli. Kreplach. Empanadas. Shish barak. Manti. XLB. Phenomenal 😭
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Christina Yuna Lee was killed in New York on Monday. In New Mexico, on Tuesday, an Asian woman was murdered at the massage parlor where she worked. A memorial in Chinatown to Christina Yuna Lee was vandalized. I don't have words anymore for this heartbreak
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absolutely aghast that I have lived this long without anyone telling me that this is how a peacock looks when it's flying
ALT peacock in flight
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the widespread idea that there are no mothers ever who regret having had children is so incorrect & wild. There are definitely mothers who can't wish their children gone, but do wish they could rewind time & undo it. I've lost track of how often I've heard this firsthand
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Asian reporters fluent in Korean who know Atlanta are being told they might be too biased to cover the shootings
& I mean who are they, who are these newsroom people telling Asian reporters they'll be too biased to cover an anti-Asian massacre, I just want to talk
Since the shootings, @AAJA members reported:
-being fluent in Korean, knowing ATL, asking to cover but being told they may be too biased
-being the only AAPI at work and feeling overwhelmed they have to represent all AAPIs
-& more.
To their newsrooms: aaja.org/2021/03/18/aaja-enc…
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Asian people—& other people too, but especially Asian people—if you see the video from yesterday of the 65-year-old Asian woman being attacked in Manhattan, you might not want to watch it. I did & it's all I can think about, I wish I could unlearn this part of it
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To the white man at the bar who asked if I'd read Faulkner, then heard me say yes, then said he’d never read Faulkner but he did once read one (1) article about Faulkner, so now he could tell me all about Faulkner's views on racism:
what, & I cannot stress this enough, the fuck
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easy things to do:
- if you hear anyone repeat the bullshit that these attacks weren't racist, tell them to shut the fuck up
- if someone proposes more policing is the answer, tell them to shut the fuck up
- if you see anyone humanize the shooter, tell them to shut the fuck up
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okay but what if RUSSIAN DOLL was god's way of inadequately preparing us for the pandemic & the way each day feels like a cursed, increasingly wearying repetition of the previous day
ALT Russian Doll screenshot
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offering this in case it’s useful to anyone: when I’m especially scared, it helps me to remind myself that probably all of my women ancestors had harder lives than I’ve had. & their strength is in me, is part of the fabric of who I am & what I can perhaps do
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tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. The names of the people who died that day:
Xiaojie Tan
Daoyou Feng
Hyun Jung Grant
Suncha Kim
Soon Chung Park
Yong Ae Yue
Delaina Ashley Yaun
Paul Andre Michels
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why the fuck not just make all the subways everywhere free, wouldn’t that be cheaper than policing the subways
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my favorite translation moment in PARASITE might have been when Ki-jeong, annoyed by her brother, says "죽을래," which the English subtitles translated as "shut up"
the literal translation of "죽을래?": "do you want to die" 💛
I watched a Korean movie on the plane and among other delights there was a moment when a character screamed FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKMOTHERFUCKINGFUCKER *in English* and the subtitles translated it as, “What the heck?”
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I wrote for @TIME about people who regret having children
I've often been told that such regret isn’t possible; for this piece, I interviewed parents who love their kids & who, if they could turn back time, might not choose to be parents again
ALT screenshot of an article in TIME, "The Parents Who Regret Having Children" illustration by Ellen Weinstein, showing an Asian person driving with a crying child in the backsar
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Maybe every week, I think about an intelligent, thoughtful, highly educated guy I knew in college who very seriously believed that, since so many of the women he knew had shimmering eyelids, our eyelid skin just naturally produces glitter
He was pre-med
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something I didn't know until I learned it firsthand: if you stay close to writers with whom you started out, & you & they keep going, then one day you might look around & realize to your amazement & joy that some of your favorite books are written by some of your closest friends
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I wrote a letter to Asian women living in America. To, not for—obviously there's no way to write for all of us—but I've felt pulled toward spaces with Asian women this week, & at least for now we were the only people I could bring myself to write to
vanityfair.com/style/2021/03…
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not enough has been said in praise of peanut M&Ms, a perfect food that can be (a) a crunchy treat (b) a source of protein (c) a stopgap meal (d) a colorful distraction from sadness (e) all of the above
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y'all how do we make it clear that racism is not a bone disease, this seems to be a point of confusion for a lot of people
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people keep saying that if this ever ends we’re never wearing heels or bras again & I definitely support your choices but also I plan to veer toward high excess. The first thing I’m buying is over-the-knee stiletto boots. I want peacock fascinators & I want chandelier earrings
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independent bookstores make something like a third of their sales between Thanksgiving & New Year's, & that's going to be really complicated this year given all the supply-chain fuckery, please consider picking out holiday presents from your local bookstores as soon as you can ❤️
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having such trouble working & only recently did I realize, I’m grieving, too. It’s not just fear & anxiety. I’m grieving what we’ve already lost, grieving the increased pain about to hit so many, & grief EATS time & attention
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an underrated pleasure is lying in bed doing exactly nothing. Just lying there, inert, being totally & exquisitely useless
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Grace Paley said politics is how we treat people & I’m now going to repeat that for the rest of my life to every person who tries to tell me they’re “apolitical”
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me: I physically need to watch a movie involving vengeance
most people: huh?
Koreans: what kind, do you want movies or shows, are you in the mood for familial vengeance or ghost vengeance or zombies or organized crime, grim or funny, historical or contemporary, how bloody
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if you can't protest in person, that's okay, you can support protestors & donate to a bail fund; if you don't have spare cash, that's okay, you can call your reps; if you fear phone calls, that's okay, you can speak up with the racists in your life; if you have trouble arguing, t
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I miss yelling with friends in bars, I miss saying yes to the fourth round & realizing it's going to be that kind of a night, I miss issuing drunken, enthusiastic affirmations of my friends' choices & swearing I'll bear a lifelong grudge against their enemies
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went out to lunch with four generations of my family, & M. & I managed to GET THE BILL, I am addled with adrenaline, I have peaked, there’s no place to go from here but down
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feeling crushed. I love this words-based cesspit. Love the jokes & highly specialized literary kerfuffles & I really, really love eavesdropping. I’ve learned so much here from eavesdropping. I can go elsewhere & will, but probably staying as long as feels conscionable
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I know there's a thing or two going on but er hi!, my first piece for the @NewYorker is up today! It's a look at the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the foundational Korean American writer & artist. & it's a goddamn honor to get to write about her 😭
newyorker.com/books/under-re…
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okay.
ALT a long comment from a white woman about how she experienced racism while living in Seoul
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was talking with a friend about a central novel character who might or might not end up having an abortion, & he said "what if she had a miscarriage, that would be more sympathetic," so well in fact he helped me figure it out, now this character is sure as fuck having an abortion
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are other introverts experiencing wildly amplified introversion these days? Been very introverted my whole life but am now so much more so, like if I'm around a bigger group of people I experience sudden-onset internal ecosystem collapse & must flee at once to a dark, silent room
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One of my teachers at Columbia was Joseph Brodsky...and he said "look," he said, "you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language."—Marie Howe
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having more trouble than usual picking myself up off the goddamn floor, I will absolutely fucking get there but it’s taking time. If you’re struggling too I salute you, from this floor
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today, like every day, I find I am once again deeply glad to be Korean
ALT Picture of yukgejang and pajun and kimchi
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shoutout to the anxious people who've tried hard this whole time to keep the plane from crashing by holding it up with our minds
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I think this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, "No Explosions," like every day:
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life
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as ever I am obsessed with Anne Carson’s mind
ALT INTERVIEWER There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer. CARSON I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case. INTERVIEWER You once said you meant unbearable in a metaphysical sense. CARSON Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people. INTERVIEWER There are those days.
ALT CARSON With sharp objects. It’s true, that’s why I go to boxing class, to learn those skills. But that’s just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say. INTERVIEWER You don’t actually get to hit anyone? CARSON You don’t hit anyone, no. INTERVIEWER But you often think about hitting someone? CARSON In boxing class, yes. That’s why I go. It’s always a surprise who turns up, in the mind, to be hit. It’s not usually the people you expect. INTERVIEWER Does your teacher encourage you to shout out names of people who are the target? CARSON No, but that would be a good idea.
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y’all I have some news: THE INCENDIARIES is being developed as a TV show!!!
& I am so very excited about working with @filmnation & @LisaMRandolph & @kogonada 😭 ahhhhh
deadline.com/2022/09/r-o-kwo…
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I keep thinking about how most of the first-generation Asian elders I know wouldn’t want to tell their own children about an attack, let alone report it. & so of course there are a lot more attacks happening. My mother was once in a car crash & didn’t tell me for months
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just signed all the way up to volunteer with @staceyabrams’s @fairfightaction for the upcoming Georgia runoffs I want the goddamn Senate I want it all fairfight.com/join-our-fight
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it has been five entire weeks since I’ve spoken in person to anyone I’m not living with & forgive me, my self-control is slipping: I will join your movement, here is a picture of me when I was 20
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was anyone else so afraid of what could happen today that you refused to let yourself imagine past the morning of 1/20 & now you feel as though you're inhabiting a strangely blank space, clean of imagined emotion, like it's an afterlife
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Last fall, I started talking publicly about being bisexual! @oprahmagazine asked if I could write about why. The first line: "I'm a private person." ❤️
oprahmag.com/entertainment/b…
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I really love Jenny George’s poetry
ALT Tin Bucket BY JENNY GEORGE The world is not simple. Anyone will tell you. But have you ever washed a person’s hair over a tin bucket, gently twisting the rope of it to wring the water out? At the end of everything, dancers just use air as their material. A voice keeps singing even without an instrument. You make your fingers into a comb.
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thinking about how, all pandemic long, zero male strangers touched me without my consent, & the minute I left my usual circles a man reached over & grabbed my arm, & what I would like to say is that clothing designers should perhaps make us jackets with literal porcupine quills
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Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton. / Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you. / Would love to make you shrimp saganaki. / Like you used to make me when you were alive.
this poem by @rocketfantastic has been singing to me all night & I’m thankful to its music
ALT Poetry text at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156433/miss-you-would-like-to-take-a-walk-with-you
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that feeling when you're at a café & you notice a stranger has your book & is reading it 👀
ALT book
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a writer on that letter went on a date with a friend & she refused to ever see him again because he spent the entire time talking about himself & failed to ask one (1) question in return
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the sucker-punch of learning that your novel—along with, it seems, the vast majority of your friends’ books—was used to train chatGPT without your consent or knowledge
worked ten years on that book, it kind of nearly killed me, this is enraging
ALT Search for an author; R.O. Kwon in the search field, which returned THE INCENDIARIES
NEW: This summer, we reported on the contents of a controversial database used to train generative AI products from Meta, Bloomberg, and others. Many people requested an ability to search it. Today, @_alexreisner delivers. theatlantic.com/technology/a…
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yesterday my anxiety was spiking really, really high, veering toward a panic attack, & for the first time I tried talking to it: I said I knew it was trying to protect me, & thanked it for trying to look out for me, but that I was okay for now
& it helped! 😭 No panic attack
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do you also have a low-key fantasy of being an "editor-at-large" for a publication except you don't necessarily want to edit, you just want to be at large & wild & free, or is that just me
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oh my goodness
A few months ago @rokwon tweeted this line, and I think about it every day. So I stitched it and now it’s going next to my mirror because she gets me 😂😅
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I wrote a piece on what have been overwhelmingly white silences about anti-Asian racism from even would-be allies. I felt I had to write this after hearing from a lot of Asian people, especially women, the past couple of months. With thanks to @VanityFair
vanityfair.com/style/2021/05…
ALT Screenshot of the title & top image of the linked article
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hi! GA & NC are looking for volunteers to help with curing rejected ballots these next few days! More ballots have been rejected from voters of color than white voters, so weird how that happens
to text-bank or phone-bank, sign up here: votesaveamerica.com/voluntee… @votesaveamerica
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hi, fiction writers, if you're able to write these days, do you have any insights into how
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I mentioned this tidbit in my first novel but once I talked to someone who’d worked at Disneyland & was fired because he was ill & had taken off his costume head to throw up—he was told he should have thrown up IN his costume head 💀
godspeed to this union
Breaking: Disneyland’s costumed character employees have voted to unionize latimes.com/entertainment-ar…
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my writer mentor said that we should consider the possibility of writing for our most generous readers, our most attentive & thorough readers
& I’ve loved that advice
“imagine the least generous reader you can imagine and pre-empt their objections” this paralyzed me for half a decade
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just started an email to my entire family with the line "I apologize for how alarming this following article is, but I'm sending it to underline how important it is to self-quarantine" or in other words I am now fully inhabiting the role of weird-aunt-who-sends-urgent-emails
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my new novel, EXHIBIT, will publish in May 2024! I started working on it in 2015 & its obsessions include art, sex, ambition, curses, Korean mythologies, & generations-old revenge, also the book is very queer
ALT Author of THE INCENDIARIES and co-editor of KINK R.O. Kwon's EXHIBIT, about a brilliant photographer drawn to a glamorous world-class ballerina first by intense artistic drives and then shared bodily desires, while grappling with what might be a curse threatening death and ruin, to Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead, by Ellen Levine at Trident Media Group (NA).
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also of course, if you didn't know, you can change your settings so that videos don't autoplay, we can try to protect our hearts, we need them for the long run
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anyone now keeping a stack-ranked list of how you caused the pandemic? my top contenders:
- said in Feb. that I finally liked my schedule & had time to write
- claimed I would do anything for more time home
- listened to Billie Eilish's "everything i wanted," multiple times
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almost everyone I'm talking with is too anxious to even let themselves hope & that is reason no. 972,817,267,263 I will never forgive that orange man & his supporters, for making it feel dangerous to hope
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just signed up for this anti-racism bystander intervention training—it’s free, & it’s an hour long ♥️ figuring this could be especially useful as more people congregate, join me?
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a strange side effect of daily anxiety is that, in times of extra stress, I sometimes end up feeling bizarrely calm—it's like, oh hello, chaos, I've been expecting you all along
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people who live with panic attacks: can you tell me what you do to fight them off. Lately mine are a factor almost daily & uh it's a lot
things that have worked for me: dancing, any fast exercise, lifting heavy weights, talking to the panic & thanking it for looking out for me
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there is almost no one I distrust more than those so juvenile as to mistake vulnerability for weakness
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it has been a full day since Four Seasons Total Landscaping happened & we still do not have an exquisitely detailed, minute-by-minute account of what went down, how can this be
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I give up this is the tastiest & most haunting ramen I’ve ever had, most likely it’ll never get better than this
(the garlic knockout ramen at Mensho in SF, with garlic five ways)
ALT bowl of ramen with an egg & various toppings including carrots
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an Asian reporter was told they might be "too emotionally invested" to report on the shootings, oh okay so like how Japanese Americans were considered too biased to be trusted during WWII, is that it?
nitter.app/chrismknapp/status/137…
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I think people tell me about this because I've written about not wanting to have kids. & often they had kids even though they weren't sure, or really didn't want to, but felt pressured, or they had religious reasons not to abort, or they couldn't abort, etc.
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I have been angry this week. Christian said, / Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.
—Natalie Diaz, from POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM
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your regularly scheduled reminder that steamed dim sum reheats easily in a microwave & it is delicious & if there is a dim sum place near you offering delivery then you too can have dim sum every week like the lord intended
ALT Shrimp dumplinhs
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truly a joy to put together this @ElectricLit list of 2021 books I'm anticipating from women of color ❤️✨❤️
electricliterature.com/44-bo…
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"We should be able to take a break from being trapped in our own minds for a little while, every now & then," I thought, wistfully, then realized this exists & it's called drugs. I tried inventing drugs
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can we get a thread going of Asian American scholars & historians & activists who might still have wherewithal for talking to media about these shootings? If you're one such scholar/historian/activist, tag yourself, maybe?
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you know what I’m excited for if & when I can go dancing again? That moment when you’re dancing & really into the music & you notice someone else is too & you kind of start dancing together & it’s joyful & funny & then you part ways & never see each other again, damn I miss that
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my body so badly wants me to buy a 50-pound bag of rice even though I don't eat all that much rice & don't cook much & have never bought a 50-pound bag of anything, how do I convince my ancestors that I won't die just because I don't have a 50-pound bag of rice
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hello! I've compiled a list of 2024 books I'm anticipating from women of color & here it is, a bonanza of novels, essay collections, memoirs, & more
electricliterature.com/75-bo…
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"...remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."—Toni Morrison (photo by Waring Abbott)
ALT photo of Toni Morrison dancing, by Waring Abbott
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author photo for the new novel 🖤🫶🏻
ALT B&W headshot with Korean woman in a trench coat
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not tweeting the New Mexico woman's name yet because I'm remembering that, last year, with the Atlanta spa shootings, there was an initial call to hold off on names until the families had all been notified. I'm so sorry we didn't protect you 💔
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it is almost unbearable to think of how big of a difference it could have made if they’d banned him months or years ago
Online misinformation about election fraud dropped 73% after they banned the liar in chief washingtonpost.com/technolog…
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