Hawaii Book & Music Festival

Donald Carreira Ching (he/him/his) was born and raised in Kahaluʻu, on the island of Oʻahu. His poetry and fiction have appeared in publications such as Rio Grande Review, NonBinary Review, and Every Day Fiction. In 2015, his debut novel, Between Sky and Sea: a Family's Struggle... Read More →

Joanna Gordon is a writer from the gentrified swamplands of East Honolulu. She is a first-year PhD candidate studying Storytelling and Rhetoric at Indiana University and has degrees from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Western Washington University. Her poems and prose have... Read More →

Navid Najafi aka Illnomadic is a founding member of  the local conscious rap collective, the Super Groupers, and a two-time Nā Hōkū Hanohano Hip Hop Album of the Year award winner. Born in Tehran Iran, Najafi found home when he migrated to Hawai‘i after high school to attend... Read More →

Ngaio Simmons (she/her, he/him) is a queer writer and performer with a degree in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Writing from the diaspora as a Māori poet born and raised away from Aotearoa, New Zealand, her work digs into such themes as diaspora, identity conflict... Read More →

Decades after quitting bands (Imminent Riot, Patty Judy & The Dirt), canceling his talk show (Shaka Talk), and halting the presses on several zines (Shaka Zine, HoStage, Contraflow), Doug Upp is lucky & grateful his words were recently seen in local magazines Tropic, and The Manifold... Read More →