A roundup of our latest releases and standout books, upcoming events, and authors making the news.
Award Winners
Congratulations to Valerie Francisco-Menchavez whose book Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis was named Winner of the Award for Best Book (2025) by the Filipino Studies section in the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS)! The awards committee praised Francisco-Menchavez for her “theoretical and methodological invocations and . . . deep commitments to the community-grounded principles of [the] field.”
Caring for Caregivers also received Honorable Mention for the AAAS Book Award in the Social Sciences category.
Congratulations as well to Laura Kina, Winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from AAAS. Kina serves as editor of our Critical Ethnic Studies and Visual Culture series and is the coeditor of two volumes on Asian American art.
Out on April 28: “A Place for What We Lose” by Tamiko Nimura
In her deeply affecting memoir, Tacoma-based writer Tamiko Nimura reckons with her father’s death and her Japanese American family’s history at the Tule Lake incarceration camp during World War II. The typewritten pages of her father’s unpublished memoir—written decades earlier about his childhood behind barbed wire—spark a reckoning with the long shadow of parental loss and the unresolved legacy of incarceration. Part memoir, part dialogue with the past, A Place for What We Lose illuminates the enduring costs of incarceration while honoring the persistence of family, memory, and story.
Publishers Weekly starred review
“In this gut-wrenching work of intergenerational dialogue, Nimura braids passages from her late father’s unpublished memoir of growing up in California’s Tule Lake Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII with her own reflections on the text. . . . [A] memorable duet.”
International Examiner review and author interview
“Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, [Nimura’s] memoir navigates the intersections of adult crises and the deeper losses of childhood, in her father’s story and her own. Along the way, she is guided by a community of survivors and descendants that materializes most vividly in the organized pilgrimages to Tule Lake.”
Alta Journal Spring books recommendation
“Nimura creates a vivid, thoughtful work that explores intergenerational trauma, parental loss, and how these histories continue to shape identity and relationships across generations.”
CHUM News author interview
“A Place for What We Lose insists on telling necessary stories for fear of them being lost, destroyed, or stolen.”
Upcoming author events
- April 28 at Tacoma Public Library, cosponsored by Write253 and King’s Books. Author reading and conversation with Renee Simms.
- April 30 at Browsers Bookshop. Author reading.
- May 5 at Seattle Public Library, cosponsored by Densho and mam’s books. Author reading and conversation with Densho Archives Director Caitlin Oiye Coon, moderated by Shawn Wong.
- May 19 at Powell’s Books, cosponsored by Japanese American Museum of Oregon. Author reading and conversation with JAMO Executive Director Hanako Wakatsuki-Chong.
Author Eric Wagner Presents “Seabirds as Sentinels”
For readers around the Puget Sound, there are plenty of opportunities to hear science and nature writer Eric Wagner discuss his new book Seabirds as Sentinels: Auklets, Puffins, Shearwaters, and the View from Destruction Island. Join us at an upcoming event to learn how seabirds can help us understand the health of our oceans.
Upcoming author events
- April 23 at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, cosponsored by the North Cascades Institute.
- May 6 at the Burke Museum, “How to Tell a Seabird’s Tale: The Role of the Writer and Scientific Illustrator.” Author in conversation with Maria Mudd Ruth (The Bird with Flaming Red Feed) and science illustrator Madison Mayfield, moderated by science journalist Sarah DeWeert.
- May 13 at UW Tacoma, cosponsored by Puget Sound Institute, University of Puget Sound, and King’s Books. Author in conversation with avian conservation biologist Peter Hodum and managing editor at the Puget Sound Institute Jeff Rice.
Seattle Shopkeeper Peter Miller’s Classic Ode to Lunch Now in Paperback
We are thrilled to be working with Peter Miller on the paperback release of his book Lunch at the Shop: The Art and Practice of the Midday Meal. Peter is the owner and operator of the now-legendary design and architecture shop Peter Miller Books.
Lauded as a “longform poem to lunch” (Food52) and a “celebration of delicious back-room improvisation” (VOGUE), Lunch at the Shop is an account and guide to elevating the midday break from a hurried routine to an intentional practice, based on Peter’s longtime tradition of making lunch with his colleagues every day at his bookshop. “Lunch is a moment to sit, to be together, to be off work, to tell tales that are not work tales, to eat in the healthiest of ways,” he writes. “Lunch is not a great brilliance—it is much more a good plan and a good heart.”
Read a feature and recipe excerpt on Cascade PBS The Nosh.
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories” Turns Fifty
This month marks the 50th anniversary of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, the bestselling book that turned Norman Maclean into a late-in-life literary phenomenon. In her book Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, Rebecca McCarthy drew on her long friendship with the beloved author-educator to reveal the forces and events that shaped him and formed the bedrock of his stories. On the blog, McCarthy reflects on how she continued to learn about Maclean long after she was finished writing the biography.
